By John Portch

In January 2022 Welsh Rugby Union issued the first professional contracts to 12 members of its senior women’s team.

The number has further increased since then and Head Coach Ioan Cunningham reflects on this development with pride, particularly in light of Wales’ creditable performances at the delayed Rugby World Cup in 2022. The team reached the quarter-finals in New Zealand before bowing out against the hosts.

“I think creating history meant something special to the group,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. The changes have been noticeable too, as Wales seek to bridge the gap between themselves and the World Cup semi-finalists, namely England, Canada, France and the world champions New Zealand.

“The physical changes – we were able to put the players on full-time programmes, maximising their rest and recovery – allowed them to get better,” Cunningham continues. “We were able to put a daytime training programme together, which was fantastic for our group, zoning in on our skillset work as well as physical conditioning, building athletes that could play the style of rugby we wanted to play.”

Cunningham, a notable contributor to our latest Special Report, is set to lead his Wales side into the 2023 Women’s Six Nations this weekend. Wales host Ireland in Cardiff on Saturday afternoon (25 March).

The preparations were in full swing when the Leaders Performance Institute sat down for a Teams call with Cunningham, who delved into his team’s hopes for the competition while reflecting on his style as a leader.

Ioan, how has the team’s transition to professionalism influenced you as a leader?

IC: I began by being coaching-focused on the grass, really getting close to the players, building relationships, growing trust, building self-belief in the players. But then as time went on, it’s sort of stepping back a little bit to that satellite view looking down on the whole programme. So what do we need to make us better? Trying to take a more holistic approach around the players, trying to get the psychologist involved, the nutritionist involved and how that fits into the team; another S&C coach and growing that department and those groups and allowing the players to flourish in the environment. My style has changed. I’m still coaching the players quite hard but also making sure that the team around me is delivering and I am checking in with them regularly to make sure that we maintain our standards.

What is the link between your standards and the culture you are seeking to create?

IC: First and foremost, we want our players to come into our environment and enjoy what they’re doing. That’s the most important thing. Within that, we will be up front and honest with each other. We did a piece early on about performance conversations and how that’s different to maybe just having a normal conversation with anyone. So when we have those performance conversations they might be difficult or hard to hear, but the feedback is coming from a good place because we want you to get better. Also, how players give feedback to each other is an important part of enabling ourselves to get better, maintaining those training standards, allowing no sloppy behaviours with regards to a meeting. We say when everyone’s in we’re ‘on’ and we don’t want to waste a rep. Those things are huge in our environment and we stay on top of those. Over the last six months, the group have grown immensely to self-police that to a point so that we can just chip in and stay on top of players and then they drive it, especially the senior group.

What do you need to be aware of in terms of the general energy of the group?

IC: We don’t want any negative people, sappers or oxygen thieves. It’s easy enough to look at something they can’t control, whether it’s the weather or timings or equipment, but what they can control is how they react to a situation and that’s still something we work hard on. Selection is a big thing. They can’t control selection. What they can do is control everything in their control to make sure they give themselves the best chance to be selected. It’s moving that energy and that focus onto them first. We had this thing last year in the Six Nations and in the World Cup. It was ‘we before me’. We put the team first before ‘me’. So if I’m thinking of the team first I’m going to do everything I can, first and foremost, to make the team succeed because it’s easy enough to point fingers and say ‘well, she didn’t do that’ or ‘this wasn’t good enough’ or ‘I didn’t have this’. But did you do everything you could?

How carefully do you choose your words? What can you say and what do you prefer to not say?

IC: It depends on the individual, the person, or the type of group that you’re dealing with, but most of the time it’s an approach of an arm around the shoulder but you’re also jabbing them in the rib. I’m coming to players with a care mindset because I want them to get better but I’m also saying it directly sometimes because ‘this is what you need to hear’. I need to check-in to make sure they have heard the message is clear because some people have listened but they don’t hear. Also, within our coaching group, I think we’re at the stage where we’ve worked together for quite a good period where we can actually ask the right questions of each other. For example, I might say to my forwards coach ‘are you looking at everything you can to make sure that we’re operating in our lineout? Can we be more creative? Do we need to go back to our skillset work?’ I might show them examples that I’m seeing and he’ll come back to me and show me examples of what he’s seeing and then we meet at a common place and say ‘this is clearly what we need to work on going forward and let’s be clear on that with the players’. And I’ll be open to him. I’ll say ‘I’ll come to you in the session. I won’t come to the players unless I need to speak to them’. I’ll say ‘keep driving something, you can do that differently, you can check there if they actually learned that’. I’ll just stay on top of that mostly day to day or in the session.

How do you work to provide opportunities for player feedback?

IC: There is a small group setup for meetings, both unit meetings as well as team. I’ve created a group which I call a ‘guidance group’ – I didn’t want to call them a ‘leaders group’, I wanted  to call them a ‘guidance group’ because I want them to guide and support, lead and feed back. Within that, there are four players who are experienced and been around the group and there’s one young player attached. She can learn off everyone else and see the type of conversations we’ll have. And they are the sounding board on the grass for me plus they deliver some of the information I want to be delivered to the team. I believe the environment is a safe one for players to speak out, ask a question. All of our team are very approachable from a management point of view and I think that creates an environment where players come in and are comfortable expressing themselves and that’s what we want.

What can you do to remove as much stress as possible from your playing group?

IC: As a leader, when you step into the building every day I think you’ve got to come in with positive high energy but also a calmness that says everything’s under control. I think that’s really important.  And to show that the messages you are giving are clear, you’re not stressed as a head coach. It’s like the old swan. You’re calm on top of the water and your legs are kicking underneath. That’s the picture and the aura you try to give off, that everything is good, calm and controlled, planned and organised. We’re focusing on the process rather than the outcome. ‘Did we do everything right this week? Yes we did.’ Back it up with confidence; ‘we’ve trained superbly well this week, we’ve done everything we can do’. So giving them that confidence. Even in the middle of games. I remember when we played the Black Ferns [New Zealand] in the quarter-final of the World Cup. We knew we were playing one of the best teams in the world and the girls gave everything in that first half and, at half-time, they were coming in thinking ‘we’re down by 20 points. What’s he going to say?’. And it was all calm and positive. ‘We’ve done superbly well, executed what we wanted to do, just keep doing it. It’s real good work.’ I remember some of the faces were like ‘oh, great’ and when you review that and speak to the players later on when the emotion’s gone a couple of days after. They said ‘we were expecting you to come in and give us a rocket but you didn’t. You backed us and supported us and said the right things’. You get a good response off that. One phrase I’ll say to the players is ‘make it hard not to pick you’. It’s making sure they realise that it’s not just what they do on the training field, it’s not just what they do with the ball in hand; have they done their injury prevention work? Have they checked-in? Have they monitored? Have they ticked everything off to make sure they are ready to go? And that is part of performance. If they have done those things there will still be a conversation in a one-to-one selection feedback meeting, for example, because it’s about habit-forming. If they don’t do these things then something’s going to break later on down the line.

You view the matches as a vehicle for your improvement?

IC: 100%. The next World Cup is in 2025, so it’s about two and a half years away; it’s not that far from the last one. So you’ve one eye on that so you’re like ‘we’ve got to start bringing fresh faces into the group, we’ve got to start exposing more players to Test match rugby to prepare them for 2025. We’ve still got to win the Test matches that are in front of our face, so how do we do that? Looking at the evolution of players as well, as in changing positions or the combination of players playing together. Those are really important. There’s a lot of stuff going into one game or this tournament. And with the Six Nations, it’s so important to start well because it’s only five games and if you don’t start well the momentum can go against you quite quickly. There’s a lot going on and it’s exciting with regards to the different bits of that jigsaw coming together and, before we know it, we’ll be in a World Cup year trying to do better than we did last time.

What would it take for your Six Nations campaign to be considered a success?

IC: Score more points, it’s as simple as that. On average, we’re scoring about 12 points a game, 15. That’s not good enough to win Test matches and to beat the better teams in the world. So our conversion rate in the opposition 22. Once we get in there can we convert more often than we have been? If we can nail those two things then we’ll certainly become a better force. If we nail what we’ve spoken about in our game from an attacking point of view, we’ll create those opportunities and you have to convert them then. I’ll give you an example, we played Canada in August before the World Cup and we had eight entries into the 22 and came away with three points. They had five entries into our 22 and came away with 22 points. It’s just those entries and those conversion rates. If you look at the ‘why’ behind that, why didn’t we convert more from those eight entries? Those are the work-ons we’ve got to nail from an accuracy point of view, players understanding, everyone on the same page, the detail within our structures, and hopefully those entries turn into more points for us.

Ioan Cunningham is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Welsh Rugby Union, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Hockey Ireland. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year, and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By John Portch with additional reporting from Luke Whitworth and Matthew Stone

The Leaders Think Tank is at once a network and a knowledge platform.

It is designed to connect people with responsibility for performance at the highest levels of world sport with each other and the ideas that have served their peers best. The top jobs in elite sport are often lonely places and always comprise unique challenges. The following is a record of the Think Tank meeting that took place at Collingwood FC in Melbourne on 7 February 2023. A behind-closed-doors event, the account that follows is a general summary and aimed at presenting the lessons learned from the conversation.

1. Peer-driven cultural change

Peer-driven cultural change places the responsibility of shaping a team’s culture in the hands of a playing group, letting them drive the desired behaviours while also ensuring that all new team members are onboarded in a suitable fashion.

Key points:

• A co-constructed plan has more credibility. Reverse-engineer your team’s culture and vision by engaging the playing group from the outset.
• The behaviours and values of a team are more definable and sustainable when they have been devised by the playing group themselves.
• Consider placing some of the younger members of your team on a leadership development programme or empower them to lead meetings – this way they can directly influence the culture while focusing on their personal development.

2. What does winning look like?

It would be disingenuous to suggest that there are not markers that denote a champion team or a medal success, but there are also cultural elements, particularly around communication and connection, that connote a winning team. Therein lies the path to success, where the score starts to take care of itself.

Key points:

• Find ways to measure and evaluate the body language of your players. What are they telling you that might be left unsaid?
• Similarly, what about your group’s collective energy? How are the players syncing up both verbally and non-verbally with each other?
• Winning teams tend to say little, which is not to say that your efforts to communicate effectively should flag. Identify and pick your moments.

3. The shifting demands of modern sport

The shifting demands in this instance are the increasing individualisation of high performance and the implications for sustaining a team ethos and culture.

Key points:

• Be engaging and exciting in your programmes and systems – athletes want to be involved in something that grabs their attention and draws them in.
• That is easier to achieve when there is clear alignment across an organisation from top to bottom.
• Is a ‘star model’ the way to go? Is there a happy medium where you provide the necessary support for your players to lead the way?

4. Changing mindsets

It is common for head coaches to assume control at a time when their new team is at a low ebb. When a playing group has lost the winning feeling, the muscle memory of what success looks and feels like, what steps can the head coach take to instil the mindset necessary to kickstart their tenure?

Key points:

• Solicit informal player feedback from your coaches and support staff. This means a head coach should accept that they may not be a player’s primary point of contact if they are to acquire the information necessary to proceed.
• You can still challenge a player. Ask them: ‘what are you going to sacrifice in order to make the team stronger?’ If they haven’t got a ready answer give them some time to think.
• Reward good behaviours and adherence to your team’s values; and then be sure to back it up with evidence, whether through datapoints or some other means.

5. Managing the moments

The best teams are able to manage the big moments in competition, putting daylight between themselves and the rest. It doesn’t happen by accident and there are steps that all leaders can take to prepare their teams for those clutch moments.

Key points:

• Do you consider the mental and emotional in your post-competition debriefs? Beyond skill execution, it is helpful for your players to understand their feelings and responses at key moments, particularly during scenario-training.
• Find video clips that support your beliefs in the direction of your team. Be intentional in highlighting when things went well and you will begin to manufacture belief. It may also make conversations about performance gaps a little easier come the time.
• If you happen to lose, give your players an opportunity to mull over what went wrong. When they know they will be heard and their coach will listen, it may generate the necessary energy for development.

By John Portch

What traits should sport scrap?

It is a question the Leaders Performance Institute poses to James King shortly after he appeared onstage at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“I think sport needs to maintain a very specific focus on what it takes to win,” says King, an advisor who has counselled government agencies, specialist military units and provides guidance to owners, managers and athletes within elite sport. In 2021, he released a book called Accelerating Excellence: The Principles that Drive Elite Performance.

“One of the popular themes over the past few years has almost been this obsession with culture,” he continues. “And I think in the popular media there’s been some incredible TED talks, great books around the topic, and I think it’s very easy to chase a subject because it’s so interesting and then look to apply it rather than focus very specifically in terms of your specific organisation in sport.

“Where are we leaking progress? Where are we breaking down? Is our culture a problem? If it is then fine, go out and read. But instead of reading and trying to copy-paste from others, really try to spend that time doing the thinking yourself. ‘Where are we leaking progress, what can we do about that?’ and intervening very specifically in that area.”

The concept of ‘leaking progress’ is one that King returns to time and again and one he referenced onstage alongside Greg Newman, the CEO of the Onyx Capital Group, which is a renowned trading firm. Both have joined the Leaders Performance Institute for a further chat. Here are some edited excerpts.

Greg, what is the best way to test your strategies around individual and collective performance?

Greg Newman: It 100% comes down to experimentation. You don’t know if things are going to be successful and you need to have that scientific approach of first hypothesising what it is you think is actually going to happen and being quite specific about that, and then you’re testing it with historical data, and then it goes to actually applying it from a non-risk perspective. So we’ll put on a strategy in live terms but it’s not actually going to make or lose money. So that’s the way you start; and then you refine that and make sure you get the learnings, refine that strategy, and then ultimately go live with it once you’re ready. When you go live, it’s also [implemented in] stages as well, [through] progressive exposure.

What steps do you advise when it’s clear that the strategy isn’t working?

GN: I think the main thing for us is to be clear about what we can control and what we can’t control. If we look at a given strategy, a given area, a given team, and they’re applying the process that we know well, we know we succeed in other areas, we know what we want from people, the skills we want them to have and demonstrate and the processes we want. So they’re doing all of those things and it’s not working, then it’s more likely going to be the market conditions or something external. It’s looking for that answer, but you have to have that ruthless approach when something isn’t working objectively. Is it better just to move on, cut your losses, and pivot somewhere else? Again, it comes down to experimentation. If it’s not working, it’s not too big of a deal, you just keep moving forward and nothing lasts, right? It’s constant adaption and evolution.

James, how do the principles of your book Accelerating Excellence most readily apply to sport?

James King: When you define ‘sport’, one of the defining elements is competition. Therefore, the objective is kind of winning or iterating towards winning more than you might lose. The foundational principles that I discuss in the book are designed with that in mind completely. They all derive from the academic study of outliers, whether that’s an individual or an organisation. So it’s breaking down and examining the causal mechanisms that are truly predictive of superior performance across time. So I think the application to sport couldn’t be neater and tidier in that respect.

In your view, what are the traits of serial winners?

JK: There’s one trait that all elite performers have in common more than anything else and that’s this concept of self-concordance. So there’s three defining themes in that. The first one is that everyone that I’ve seen that excels, and also examining the literature, is very clear that those individuals perform roles where their strengths align very much with the roles they perform, whether that’s a style of play, whether that’s the domain they’re in, full stop. The second component would be their sincere interests. Some might describe it as ‘passion’ but I prefer the word ‘interest’; to me, passion’s a short-term temporary high, whereas an interest is this almost semi-permanent attraction or instinctive attraction to a certain activity or area. And I think that everyone I’ve seen excel has that almost obsession with the craft they’re competing in. Then, finally, it would be this concept of the goals they’ve pursued in sport have aligned with their values and they’ve probably had maybe a little bit of luck here but have been exposed to demonstrating their strengths and interests for an organisation that sincerely aligns with their own values, again whether that links to the style of play or the behaviours that are acceptable in that environment or what that club and organisation stands for. And I think you get this sweet spot when people are able to pursue a role that optimises all their natural strengths in that area where they are sincerely obsessed and for an organisation where their values just align and they’re just so in sync with what that organisation wants to achieve.

If you could both give one piece of advice to coaches here today, what would it be?

GN: Like I was saying onstage, it’s absolutely following a process. I know that’s become embedded in sport now, that’s like the way things are going; really believing in processes even when it comes to wellbeing, people around you and getting the best out them. So your vision, setting that north star, setting that constant improvement. All these things can seem on the face of it very vague and maybe even wishy-washy, but there are processes out there that you can apply. [Being] rigorous and really concentrating on that process, whatever it might be, and sticking to it. If something it’s going to be about you, and that’s not really definable, that’s not really scalable; [you need] a process that you can apply and improve, teach other people, and scale that way.

JK: The one piece of advice I’d give to coaches is to make sure you’re very clear on what it takes to win in the craft you’re coaching in, then, secondly, understand very specifically where the athlete or the performer you’re coaching is in relation to that, where they’re – I use the term again – leaking progress, and then, thirdly, make sure you understand who they are as an individual and how they are optimised. What are their strengths technically? What are their strengths psychologically? What’s their interest on the pitch or in the boardroom, if you’re working outside of sport. Then what’s most important to them? And make sure you create an environment that optimises those things. The question I get commonly asked is: ‘how do you optimise this person’s performance or that person’s performance?’ I think the real question is how do you optimise the conditions so that that person optimises their own performance? And that’s where I think coaches should be focusing because if you understand those things so well, the solutions in terms of what to coach and how to coach just fall in your lap.

In partnership with

By Luke Whitworth

The focus of our inaugural Leaders Meet in Australasia centred on the theme of high performance environments.

Across the course of two days, we sought to break down this theme by watching a live environment in practice, exploring frameworks and perspectives on how to recruit talent for your environment, the power of teaming and how it drives collaboration and teamwork, and insights from different industries on how to design, shape and evolve environments.

Here are the key takeaways from the second day.

(Day 1 takeaways here.)

Session 1: The Cohesion of Teams – What Are The Secrets of Effective Collaboration?

Speaker: Benjamin Northey, Principal Conductor in Residence, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

• Building culture: in the context of an orchestra, the building of the culture has to come from the players – how are they driving that? It is a complex challenge for leaders to navigate.
• Proficiency: the proficiency of players to lead is a challenge – if we can create an environment where players or athletes take the lead in driving the internal culture, it can be harnessed in a much more powerful way.
• Group psychology: the psychology of the orchestra is the biggest challenge for conductors – understanding personalities, managing energy, focus and harnessing the collective will of the players. They all want it to be great but have all of their own ideas of how to get there.
• Communicate clearly: preparation happens incredibly fast, so there is pressure on the leader or conductor in this context to communicate the vision in a very clear way. Ben also talked about a leader having a point of focus that encourages clear alignment.
• Problem-solving: create an environment where there is self-correcting led by the players. Too often we see the leader listen or observe and start to provide solutions to the problem. In the orchestra, allow them to play, create a space for reflection as a group and in the second phase of rehearsal, you will see an impact straight away without the leading having to get involved.
• Collaboration begins with listening: encourage people to listen to each other and the real time processes of creation. The players have roles to play but they all need the creative intelligence to adjust that role themselves in the moment to the response of what they are hearing around them – the parts that unify them around us.
• Elite awareness: the cohesion of the orchestra is to find the understanding of not their own part, but the notes of others. The success of the group relies on connection, shared values and unified work. We are looking to generate elite awareness within the group.
• Creative intelligence: use your own creative intelligence. This concept is something that needs to be reinforced all the time or else it disempowers the innate creativity of the individual. The success of an orchestra relies on individual perspectives to work – ‘everyone is an artist’ is a piece of terminology that is used within the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Session 2: Change & Transition – How to Lead When There is a Shift in Behaviours

Speaker: Reb Rebele, Senior Research Fellow, The Wharton People Analytics initiative

• Consideration: how do you create sustained performance? Where does behavioural change sit within this?
• Behavioural science: studying how to get yourself or others to do something helpful – or to stop doing something harmful.
• Typical approach: when thinking about behaviour change, we collect all sorts of techniques and tools such as research and books. We collect nudges, techniques and hacks. In this toolkit we typically find something that works; rinse and repeat. However, contexts are different and it doesn’t tend to happen the same way.
• Tap into a goal that someone already has or a core value, connecting the behaviour change to that.
• Framework: am I trying to influence ‘temporary’ and ‘enduring’?

1. Temporary

• One-time behaviours.
• Context-specific behaviours (particular time and place).
• Short-term shifts (some kind of disruption – change of behaviours for a period of time before returning to some form of ‘normality’).
• Challenge for leaders: address the proximal cause – immediate goals, environment. 

2. Enduring

• Habit formation.
• Habit breaking.
• Personality change.
• Challenge for leaders: address the root cause (beliefs, values and identity). 

3. Motivated

• Existing desire (someone who comes to you for help)
• Aligned interests / values (clear link between the behaviour change and their goals).
• Challenge for leaders: reinforce current goals and values. 

4. Unmotivated

• Indifference (lack of interest – doesn’t see any reason to change).
• Aversion (active dislike / resistance to the behaviour change).
• Challenge for leaders: create new goals and values.

Bringing the Framework to Life

• How can I help someone to follow-through on that motivation in a particular instance? (Motivated x Temporary)
• How can I help someone be more consistent? (Motivated x Enduring)
• How can I help someone stretch outside their comfort zone? (Unmotivated x Temporary)
• How can I help someone achieve transformation? (Unmotivated x Enduring)

Session 3: Fostering Googleyness – How to Recruit & Retain for a World Class Culture

Speaker: Tova Angsuwat, Recruiting Lead, Google

• Google wanted to figure how to create the highest performing team – one of the hypotheses was if you bring the same people together with the same characteristics together, they would perform well. The second, bringing the best people in the organisation together. Neither yielded the results the organisation expected.
• Project Aristotle: great teams can be measured. Google’s research came up with five characteristics:

1. Psychological safety: comfortable to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. These teams challenged leaders, asked lots of questions and shared lots of things in meetings – it drove innovation and enhanced the ability to collaborate. As a leader, a good question to ask in a meeting or conversation is ‘what is something I might have missed?’
2. Dependability: getting things done on time to a high standard of excellence.
3. Structure and clarity: clear roles, plans and goals.
4. Meaning: work is personally important to team members.
5. Impact: their work matters and creates change.

Keys to defining culture:

• Mission, transparency and voice underpin the Google culture.
• Transparency: Google provides access to all of the information, even if you are an intern. Each Friday there was a TGIF with the founders where you can ask any question you like. This aspect of transparency is incredibly powerful. Can you push to be more transparent? It increases people engagement and buy-in to the organisation.
• You told us this, so we are doing that – a really powerful line for anyone to consider and use as a leader.
• Voice: how do you help everyone in the organisation an aspect of voice? Employee engagement surveys, opportunities for asking questions etc. Every time you do that, thank them for the feedback and share it back with them.

Tips for recruiting and retaining top talent

1. The most important skills to assess are not role-related: this can be very counterintuitive. Every person that is hired is interviewed against four attributes – role-related knowledge, problem-solving ability, leadership, and values fit.
2. Your greatest value proposition is meaning and purpose: sense of meaning and purpose is what people want from their jobs. What’s important to them and what can you offer?
3. Don’t hire people like you: who is going to complement you? In your teams, you need more of what isn’t there or who is going to add to you. Consider ‘culture add’ versus ‘culture fit’.
4. Share your ‘fungus’: as you think about retaining talent, you want to share what is going on within the organisation because they will see it when they do join.

Session 4: Inclusive Environments – Can High Performance Sport Create a Culture of Belonging?

Speaker: Matti Clements, Acting Director, Australian Institute of Sport

• Can ‘belonging’ drive a high performance culture?
• If belonging should be considered as a variable or aid of a high performance culture, how much time in a week do you spend actively prioritising it in your leadership role?
• Self-determination theory: autonomy, competence and belonging. This theory is about how an individual interacts with and depends on their social environment. It is based on the fundamental humanistic assumption we lean towards growth in ourselves.
• Autonomy: have some control over their lives and that they make choices they want to make.
• Competence: achievements, knowledge and skills – the need to build competence and mastery over the tasks that are important to them. We need to feel effective in the culture or environment we are in.
• Belonging: a sense of connectedness.
• Psychological research shows that cultures and environments that show these three needs, that people engage really deeply in the tasks and activities they are asked to commit to, thus enhancing performance. These organisations also have higher psychological health.
• ‘Belonging allows the individual to regulate and focus their attention on the things they need to thrive. It allows the individual to give more to something greater than their own personal needs.’

Takeaways from the development of strategy: belonging

• We often go to a small group of people – made a concerted effort to go wide and broad so everyone had an opportunity to contribute. Constantly asking who might think they don’t belong to this strategy and how do we get them in the room? Who is not represented and how do we make sure they get a voice?
• Check and challenge: scenarios were set up with questions such as ‘what won’t work?’ and ‘what’s the challenge?’ The purpose was creating connectedness to the process.
• Background work: very intentional on helping people to speak up and those that can dominate where spoken to around letting others speak up.

Vision & core values:

• Vision: We win well to inspire Australians.
• Core values: excellence / belonging / courage / connection.

HP 2032 and belonging levers:

• Connection to country.
• Inclusive design.
• Win well.

Session 5: The Application of Knowledge – Making Learning a Successful Process​

Speaker: Eddie Jones, Head Coach, Rugby Australia

• Levers to make a difference: you’ve got to have understanding of how you want to play and become automatic in that. Players can do it when there isn’t any pressure, but when the heat is on and being able to turn it on when it matters is a huge differentiator.
• Intent: when you are coaching with a team without long preparation periods, you have to get the intent right. Players will be given a framework with clarity, but then they have to think and work it out.
• Environment: give your athletes a good environment. The element that coaches do the worst is belonging – with the younger generation today, belonging is so important for them. Simple best practices such as shaping a room in a ‘U’ shape instead of rows to generate eye contact.
• New generation talent: the modern leader also needs to create an environment to generate skills they aren’t experiencing in society as easily anymore. They want a coach they can trust, who will push them to optimise themselves, but who is also loving.
• Be context-specific: be specific on taking learnings back to your teams to contextualise.
• Specificity of training: after travelling to meet the US Navy SEALs, a key takeaway from Eddie’s visit was the specificity of training towards the harshest moments of ‘the game’. We train our athletes to make the game easier. Free your players so you don’t just stick to tradition.
• Power of observation: as a coach, your greatest skill is your observation skills – your players have a pattern of behaviour, so you are looking for those changes. Good coaches observe behaviours and interactions.
• Modern head coaching: the role has become much more complex. In elite sport, staffing has doubled, larger playing squads both inside and outside of the environment – leaders need more assistance. Who is your critical friend and set of eyes to challenge what you are doing? If you are starting off as a young coach, keep an experienced coach close to you.
• Key learnings: quality of staff, don’t shortcut them or else you get caught. Recruit really well for your staff and have a criteria for what you need. Secondly, teams are much more dynamic than before, you have to be prepared to adapt really quickly.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the first day here.

Speakers:

Lorraine Brown, Head of Performance, GB Climbing

Rob Pountney, Chief Operating Officer, Breaking GB

Moderator: 

Edd Vahid, Head of Academy Football Operations, The Premier League

At the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium, we heard from Lorraine and Rob who have been at the forefront of two new sports, and how they preparing for Olympics whilst staying true to the culture of their sports.

• We have had a cultural shift in climbing from participation to performance.
• We have to make sure the pathway is really clear, and look at ways to identify how to add value on a daily basis.
• You have to stay true to your own sport, it is easy to think you have to be like the other sports who have been well established. Keep the roots and culture of the sport whilst making the transition to Olympic sport and the increasing demands it brings.
• What does talent look like? Once we have talent, how do we help them progress? How do we create the experiences to help them fulfil their potential?
• Lots of athletes coming from other sports, migrate to climbing for its culture. How can we still be an outlet for other athletes who want to try something different?
• Breaking is about pushing the individual boundaries of your own creation which makes the training environment very challenging.
• The idea of making sure it is fun has to be top of the pile. We don’t have the fear of change right now, we are trying to find the way the sport should look based on the culture of the sport. We have the freedom to make bold decisions.
• Every day we have to accept the different behaviours from our athletes, they are more independent and have more control over their schedules. Coaches and team managers have to work with the athletes whilst embracing the individuality and creativity of the athletes.
• How do we maintain that cultural element but also raise the standard and expectation and develop the right environments for athletes and coaches to thrive in.

By Sarah Evans

• A hero must write their own story

• We transform through making mistakes

• It is about the team, not about you

A hero must be active not reactive

“We all subconsciously believe that the world happens to us rather than we shape our world”, Meg LeFauve, co-writer of Pixar’s Inside Out, explained at our Sport Performance Summit in LA back in 2016. She built on this to say that the hero must write their own story. Heroes that we truly connect with, LeFauve stated, “have to want something deeply, they have to have a spark of something – determination, courage or grit which drives them on.” However, she also explained that they always have a flaw and a mask. The flaw is not always a negative, but actually through the story the hero comes to understand their flaw and transforms it into a strength. We all have multiple sides to our identities and our mask is what we present to the world, however, underneath that is our vulnerability, and through storytelling we can uncover this mask and be comfortable with our vulnerabilities.

Obstacles are a way of cracking open a belief system

LeFauve highlighted that as children we all create our own belief systems about how we think the world works and who we think we are within that world. These belief systems are designed to keep us safe. However, “often the very belief system that saves you as a child, will kill you as an adult”. LeFauve added that we often out grow these belief systems or they no longer service us. This is where obstacles come in. “We use obstacles to crack open a belief system” LeFauve said, and explained that they’re used to check-in where you are, what you know or don’t know and what you are good at or not good at. “We transform by making mistakes and by failing”. The brain learns and changes by experience and that is why it is so important to be open to failing. As LeFauve said so eloquently, “failure is the tool of transformation.”

You have to become comfortable with vulnerability if you want deep change

Within storytelling, LeFauve explained that “the antagonist is someone who helps the protagonist to transform.” Within sport, this could manifest as an injury, a setback or a coach challenging the athlete, to help them overcome obstacles and “push through the vulnerability to get through it and grow,” she said. It often occurs when the hero is at their lowest point, stripped back, and it is a death moment. “If you want deep change, there has to be a death moment, it is the death of their old belief, their old self, who they thought they were,” she continued. It is all about thinking that this experience is here for a reason, and understanding what it is helping you to learn. LeFauve talks about shifting the context to you being at the centre, you are choosing to be here and to turn up every day. Any day you can choose not to be here, so what are you here for?

Create an environment where there is no judgement when you fail

LeFauve explained that within storytelling, there is no judgement when they give negative feedback or mistakes are made, they always think “what did that give us? What did you discover in doing that?” This then takes the judgement out and most importantly the pressure of identity out of it. It is not a reflection on your intelligence or creativity, it is not about you. “It is about the movie and giving to the process because everyone is invested in the movie” she said. This is so important within high performance sport too, and ultimately you want everyone to be fighting for the team, not for themselves. It is about the team, not about you as an individual, and everyone doing their best for the team will inevitably be the best route towards success.

By John Portch

• Learn to understand your biases when weighing up information.

• There is no perfect machine learning model.

• An effective model generates feedback for users.

Understanding ‘bounded rationality’

Sports practitioners are measuring more than ever but it is still not a complete picture. “There’s a number of different reasons we don’t measure something we know is important,” Sam Robertson, a sports researcher, told the 2018 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. It could be a question of finance, access or time. Whatever the reason, he continued, “this is a problem in sport because we start to see a disproportionate focus on information that’s available.” This leads to what political scientist Herbert A Simon termed ‘bounded rationality’. Robertson, who has worked with organisations including the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, Fifa and the AFL’s Western Bulldogs, produced a slide containing a quote from Christian Lebiere and John R. Anderson that built on Simon’s point. It read: ‘The rationality of a decision should be considered in the context of the environmental and cognitive constraints acting upon the decision-maker’. Therefore, as Robertson said: “having a basic understanding of how bounded rationality is applied in this environment allows us to transform the way we display empathy and communicate with our staff and athletes”.

The perfect model is not out there

When evaluating information, Robertson argued that the law of diminishing returns, so visible in economic theory, applies to both humans and machines in performance settings. “Humans and machines do this in very similar ways, which is sometimes lost in the ‘humans versus machines’ debate,” he said. He made the point that humans cannot process large amounts of information concurrently, whether as a consequence of ecological adaptation or cognitive limitation (the jury is still out). Similarly, he explained that machine models are designed to be generalisable to new situations, that they are designed to express concepts as accurately and with as few variables as possible. As mentioned above, there are things we can and cannot measure. Robertson introduced a third layer. “There is information that we were never going to consider – we don’t know what we don’t know,” he added. “What information matters right now to the evaluation of a player that we’ve not even thought about?” It is important to be able to call on different machine learning algorithms in an applied environment. “We want [the model] that works well, but uptake can be based on a number of factors.”

Choosing the right model

What are some of those factors? “When we evaluate something like this, the decision of the human or the machine or the recommendation, it’s really important [to consider] how that recommendation performs,” said Robertson. He cited accuracy, how the model improves existing practice and by how much. Human factors are important too. It needs to be feasible in your environment, be cheap to run and be understood quickly if it is to generate usable insight. “The term I use to describe this area is ‘operational compatibility’. Is the way we’ve developed the recommendation or the visual report compatible with the way that we make decisions in our particular organisation?” It must also be able to highlight uncertainty and facilitate feedback that enables a choice to be made. “Can we look at the same problem in four different ways? Having that basic understanding of machine learning, even without being an expert in it, can help us look at the problem differently.”

By Sarah Evans

Recommended reading

Is a Lack of Diversity Holding your Team Back? Here Are Some Steps you Can Take to Create a True Sense of Belonging

How the Brooklyn Nets Put their People at the Heart of their Culture

Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness

Framing the Topic

In this Member Case Study format of our Virtual Roundtables, Dan Jackson, the Head of Leadership and Culture Development at the AFL’s Adelaide Football Club, spoke about the relationship between environmental profiling and evolving team culture. Dan is a former professional AFL player and he explained how his own experiences of the high performance environment as a player has influenced his work to evolve team culture with the Crows.

Dan framed the session by breaking it down into three parts:

1. Assessing culture
2. Changing culture
3. Cultural trends

Assessing culture

What is ‘culture’?

“Culture is both a dynamic phenomenon that surrounds us at all times, being constantly enacted and created by our interactions with others and shaped by leadership behaviour, and a set of structures, routines, rules and norms that guide and constrain behaviour.” (E. Schein, 2004)

Jackson’s definition: “Culture is a reflection of how a consistent group of people behave in a particular environment over time.”

In assessing the culture of a group, there are three cultural pillars:

• Artifacts: the phenomena that one sees, hears, and feels. For example, trophies, medals, kit. Anything you can capture with a photo.
• Exposed beliefs and values: strategies and goals, i.e. Mission. Philosophies and values, i.e. vision. Sometimes these can just go up on a wall and simply be words – how can you bring these to life? It is about people’s behaviour, and something you could see on video.
• Underlying assumptions: unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions, thoughts and feelings. These are mental models and are the ways that people think.

Changing culture

Unfreeze

• Acknowledge the status of the existing culture by presenting the ‘disconfirming data’ needed to change people’s minds and attitudes.
• Changing leadership doesn’t lend itself to sustainable success, it can simply paper over the cracks in the foundations. It is crucial to first look in the mirror to rebuild a culture.

Cognitive restructure

• Rules and standards of behaviour. This requires rewards and punishments to drive results.
• Vision and values. What are we trying to achieve and what do we stand for.
• Clarity on who we are and what is expected and not expected.

Evolve

• This is continuous.
• People and environments are constantly changing and therefore we need to continuously evolve the team culture, whilst staying in touch with the team’s origin story.

Cultural trends

• Connection and belonging
• Psychological safety
• Strengths over deficits
• What else?

Members’ thoughts on current trends:

• Surveys that are meant to attract employee responses where employees are too scared to be honest.
• Increased awareness of diversity and how this can enhance cultural development
• Radical honesty.
• That culture is a ‘thing’ we work on.
• Leaders aren’t necessarily the most experienced.
• Embracing your role in living and creating the culture
• Breaking psychological safety into the four stages proposed by Timothy Clark so that people understand the difference between creating the level of psychological safety to feel part of the team and the level required to challenge the cultural norms.
• Player empowerment – how much value does this have compared to a coach-led environment?

By Luke Whitworth

A fundamental aspect of sustaining success over a long period of time is the strength of an organisation’s culture.

Research by Alex Hill and the Centre for High Performance into how successful organisations can outperform their peers for more than 100 years, highlights a number of common characteristics between industry-leading organisations such as the New Zealand All Blacks, NASA, the Royal College of Art, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. If you are interested in hearing from two leaders of organisations who were part of this study – Eton College and the Royal College of Art – you can view this session from the 2018 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

Besides the number of characteristics that these organisations have, simply put, they all take culture incredibly seriously. They work at it. They constantly review. They are always evolving, but with a number of cornerstones that remain foundations of how they operate.

As part of an intriguing set of conversations between Leaders Performance Institute members, the group discussed some of their thoughts around how they think about cultural evaluation.

1. Perform culture health checks

How often are you proactively measuring the strength of your culture? A number of organisations look to review and evaluate on an annual basis, but should they be more frequent? Some participants on the call suggest a review every three months is a powerful way of taking the pulse of the environment. On this theme, be mindful of the tension between what the data suggest, versus the awareness and insight of the culture that occurs through sitting, listening and talking to people. It can be easy to jump to the measurable part of the evaluation and determine the health of the culture on that – be aware of what the data doesn’t show us.

2. How do you use language?

Language is a powerful notion, particularly when there is clear alignment and consistency around how your people communicate the mission, values and behaviours. We can engage in measurements to evaluate culture, but you can also see it, feel it and, most importantly, hear it. Are your athletes and staff using the language that aligns to the culture we want to live by? If not, it suggests there is some work to be done to create wider organisational alignment.

3. What is your culture’s openness to change?

Change is one thing in life that is guaranteed, none more so than in high performance sport where we experience fast-paced and ever-evolving environments. As human beings, we are wired to not like change. A question to consider when analysing your culture is ‘how open are we to change?’ because it will inevitably come. It can be an integral measure in understanding how robust the culture is. To evolve and improve, we need that growth mindset and willingness to be adaptable within the environment. Have you ever questioned your peers and asked them of your environment, ‘what do you think we are losing or would lose if we were to engage in change?’ This is a simple but effective way of highlighting what is working in the environment – try to keep these components and grow in other areas.

4. Identify and evaluate pain points and disruptions

Every environment experienced disruption and the emergence of pain points. Are you identifying and evaluating what these are, as they will have a direct impact on your culture? As society evolves, it’s important to be on the pulse of what this might mean for your specific environment and those operating within that. Mapping the pain points provides more opportunity to review and reflect as to whether you are providing that level of support and shaping the environment to optimise the performance of your people. Consider garnering feedback through the use of focus groups, and perhaps seek feedback from those in the organisation who you don’t hear from as much.