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.

By John Portch

• How do you check and challenge yourself that the message received is the message perceived?

• Developmental or motivational feedback – what does each of your athletes require today?

• What can you do to ensure the collective efficacy of your team?

What the research is telling us about high performance environments

David Fletcher, who is the Senior Lecturer in Performance Psychology and Management at Loughborough University and a Leaders Performance Advisor, shared a high performance model with an audience at Leaders Meet: High Performance Environments in 2021. In making his presentation, Fletcher drew on varies studies, including the 2009 white paper by Graham Jones, Mark Gittens and Lew Hardy titled ‘Creating an environment where high performance is inevitable and sustainable: The high performance environment model’. That paper formed the basis of Fletcher’s onstage exploration of leadership, performance enablers, and people within a high performance model.

He said: “Although I don’t think it provides the definitive answer, what I do think it does is provide a nice starting point.”

Three important aspects of effective high performing leadership

“What does effective high performing leadership look like within a high performance environment?” asked Fletcher.  Jones, Gittens and Hardy identified three main considerations for leaders:

1. Establishing the team’s vision then role modelling and communicating that to followers.
2. Challenging their followers to make their contribution to fulfilling the vision.
3. The leader must support their followers in making their contribution.

“They argued that it wasn’t enough to be good in two of these three areas,” said Fletcher. “In fact, it could be catastrophic if you’re only good at vision and challenge but no support. It’s going to be a relentless environment where burnout is going to prevail.” He also mentions the important distinction between what coaches perceive they give their athletes and the message the athlete receives and perceives. “There needs to be checks and balances in place to let leaders be aware of how they’re providing support across the high performance environment.”

Developmental v motivational feedback

Part of a leader’s role, as Fletcher said, is to provide environmental enablers that offer the support for people to operate in a high performance environment. The research points to the importance of information [feedback, clarity, support], instruments [tools, frameworks], and incentives [meet the athlete’s need for competency, autonomy and relatedness].

Fletcher honed in on the difference between developmental and motivational feedback. “Developmental feedback is the type of feedback that says ‘you are here. In order for us to be here, this is what needs to happen’,” he said. “But the other type of feedback you get under social support is motivational feedback; and motivational feedback is slightly different. ‘This is where you were, this is where you now are. Look how far you’ve come over the last six months.’ The best leaders are able to balance the motivational and developmental support appropriately for different individuals within the performance environment. It’s where the science shifts towards the art of coaching and high performance leadership.”

Attitudes, behaviours and capability

The research discussed by Fletcher also highlighted the traits needed by those operating in ever less hierarchical high performance environments. It identified three buckets. Firstly, the question of attitudes, from trust in one’s leader to organisational commitment via collective efficacy and job satisfaction. Secondly, Fletcher delved into the necessary behaviours, including being helpful, engaging enthusiastically and volunteering when possible. The third bucket was capability, specifically the ability of people to support talent development, provide emotional intelligence and develop mental toughness.

‘High performance cultures don’t just show up’

We asked Leaders Performance Advisor Rachel Vickery to reflect on Fletcher’s findings and to share her thoughts on the move away from hierarchical models and the ways that leaders can make a distributed model work for their high performance teams.

Rachel, how common is a dispersed/distributed leadership model in high performance sport these days?

We are increasingly seeing organisations and teams embracing more of a distributed leadership approach, even if they don’t identify with that model by name. We are seeing teams collaborate on things like values, and more importantly how these values are ‘lived into’ in an individual’s role. For example, ‘courage’, ‘integrity’ or ‘excellence’ will be expressed differently by front office staff, compared with board members, or coaches, or athletes or support staff. This sort of approach empowers each individual of a team, irrespective of their role, to take ownership of creating a high performance environment in their area and as it feeds into the collective organisation; rather than defaulting to expecting that it is someone else’s job, or a subconscious belief that a high performance culture just shows up. And we are seeing more individuals within an organisation understanding the importance of modelling high performance culture, leading by example and holding others accountable to agreed standards by having courage to have difficult conversations.

What tips do you have for leaders seeking to make a distributed model work? Any pitfalls to avoid?

The three points identified by Jones, Gittens and Hardy in the article above still hold, and as David wisely points out, it’s essential to include all three. Regular open and transparent communication ensures the model constantly evolves, rather than being a discussion at the beginning of a season that fades into the background once the daily grind kicks in.

Developing a high performance environment is everyone’s responsibility, so leading and interacting with others in a way they understand their individual and collective value to the shared goal is essential for ongoing buy-in. Perhaps this model evolves more organically in team-based sports, where many different roles interact daily under the same roof. Olympic and individual sports where people might be spread around the country require more intentional focus on implementing these steps for the model to work, but the effort is worth it.

Avoiding pitfalls revolve around ensuring as a leader that you are living by example, not paying lip service to it or just telling others to do so. It’s not uncommon in organisations with a poor culture to hear coaches, boards or support staff harshly criticising athletes for not having an excellence mindset, integrity or willingness to do the one percenters; yet not living the same in their role. That’s about the fastest way to undermine respect and a high performance culture! And remembering that people will follow the strongest energy in the room (or team, or on the field), which is great when that energy aligns with high performance traits; but destructive if the strongest, most influential energy is toxic. So it is important to call out toxic personalities or actions quickly.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• Psychological safety is the biggest difference between the top and lowest performing teams

• It requires intentional work on the part of leaders

• Is it ‘failure’ or simply a problem to solve?

Quick recap: what is psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson, an organisational behavioural scientist, coined the term ‘team psychological safety’. She defined it as: “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” When Google announced the results of its Project Aristotle, which sought to understand the characteristics of effective teams. Psychological safety was identified as the biggest factor. The others were ‘dependability’, ‘clarity,’ ‘impact’ and ‘meaning’. But psychological safety stood out.

“This is a little bit of a clinical-sounding term but this is the best one we have to describe this sense of ability to take interpersonal risks in a work setting,” said Abeer Dubey, Google’s Director of People Analytics, who led Project Aristotle. Dubey was speaking to an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members at 2021’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Total High Performance.

He continued: “We have all been in a situation where somebody senior in an organisation or the hierarchy suggested something and we may or may not agree with that; or some acronym has been thrown out there in a team meeting. Are we in a culture where we feel comfortable raising our hands either in terms of pushing back on a decision made by a senior leader or asking a question that may seem like a stupid question in the context of the meeting?

What does that look like in practice?

Dubey painted a picture of psychological safety at Google. “Teams that were good at doing this had that safe environment where people took small interpersonal risks on a day to day basis,” he said. “They will jump or chime in. This wasn’t just something about feeling good. We could actually see a direct impact on our revenue performance, especially in our sales team.” Teams that feel safe are more effective. “Through this comes this process of learning quickly and this translates into a direct impact,” he added.

How can you help your teams to get better?

Google instigated its gTeams programme, which was designed to help the organisation improve across the key characteristics identified in effective teams by Project Aristotle. Of gTeams, Dubey said: “It’s very difficult to even bring up a topic like psychological safety unless you have a term for it. If there’s no formal construct for that then these things can easily go unnoticed, so I think an explicit practice of going through this type of review is something that can help thousands of companies.”

From failure to problem solving

For astute leaders, there is the potential for failures to become problem-solving exercises for teams to coalesce around. Dubey cites the ‘pre-mortems’ carried out by the Google X innovation lab under its CEO Astro Teller. “He got the senior members of his team and he said ‘OK, imagine if we had actually failed in a project,’” said Dubey. “If you think about today and what’s working, people always get in defensive mode. He said: ‘OK, think about it yourself. If we had failed, what could we have done better?’ And it completely changed the dynamic where the thing that could have been defensive became like a problem-solving exercise and everyone came together. He calls this exercise a ‘pre-mortem’, which is where you imagine that you have already failed and this is what we could have done about it. That’s the kind of thing we ask people to think about. Small things in a day to day setting that can have a huge impact.”

Is there truly room for psychological safety in sport?

In 2021, we published a Special Report that reflected on psychological safety’s journey towards being acknowledged as a competitive edge in sport and, in bringing those pages to life, we spoke to Leaders Performance Advisor, David Fletcher, the Senior Lecturer in Performance Psychology and Management at Loughborough University.

These are an excerpt of his reflections at the time:

“What I think will be very interesting looking at the next five years, is the whole wellbeing and welfare movement in elite sport because that’s definitely gaining momentum and traction, with good reason. How do we sit that alongside the demands for high performance and wanting to win? That’s not going to go away either. The best athletes and the best coaches are going to have a real need to win.

“We’ve seen in the past, whether it be Lance Armstrong or Michael Jordan, this burning desire to succeed at all costs, spills over. There’s a real recognition in elite sport that that does happen and has happened.

“The question now is how can we manage that will to win at all costs? I’m not sure you can do that in people who really want to win; like the people who are training for an Olympic gold medal. They’re totally single-minded. It’s not necessarily about taking the edge off that, it’s about juggling that to a point where it’s not winning at all costs – it’s winning hopefully without other costs.

“That’s where I hope psychological safety will play a role within that, where it becomes a more sophisticated culture and climate where we can strive to excel, we can strive to win, but not at the cost of cheating, bullying, abuse, fear of failure.

“It’s very easy for me to say it but it’s a lot harder in the cutthroat nature of elite sport. When you start losing people’s jobs and positions are on the line; that’s when this really gets put to the test.”