Full transcript: Dr Claire-Marie Roberts – Establishing an elite performance culture

So I’m going to offer you some perspective, I hope. My challenge to you today is to try and think differently about some of the things we hear and are told about elite cultures. 

Specifically, when you layer on the reality of professional football – in this instance, in my current experience, professional men’s football.

I want you to think critically about some of the information that comes at you from some of the non-fiction books that you might read, some of the development programmes that you might attend, and some of these events, actually. 

I’m going to offer you some perspective and some insight and I’m really looking forward to your questions and your challenges.

Elite performance cultures: The ideals

So what do we mean by elite performance cultures?

If you read research and popular non-fiction books – things that are given to you on some of the performance development programmes you might attend – you’ll know that elite performance cultures are basically standards to achieve the vision.

Culture is a bit of a buzzword at the moment. I think people have jumped onto this bandwagon. So today, hopefully I’ll give you a hefty dose of reality in relation to some of this information you’re bombarded with.

If you read literature, whether it’s research or somebody putting pen to paper and publishing a book that’s going to be their retirement plan, you’ll know that elite performance cultures are establishing and reinforcing norms in the environment that dictate expected standards and help you work towards a common goal.

Sounds great. Research suggests they directly impact performance, that the leader’s values are often the blueprint for the elite culture that you exist in. They involve transparent roles and responsibilities. 

They are blissfully evidence-based, performance-orientated and science backed. Psychological safety is a key function of an elite performance environment and culture.

The focus is on continuous improvement and ultimately it optimises staff and player health and wellbeing. It sounds amazing and I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t want to sign up to this. 

When you look at what that looks like in practice, the constituent parts, I’ve picked out a few. This is a non-exhaustive list.

You’ll hear things like person-centred, I’m sure. In fact, some of the presentations yesterday talked about the person-centred nature of functional elite performance cultures and environments. They will involve coaching excellence, whatever that is.

They will involve clear pathways of progression for staff and players. They will be characterised by an openness to new ideas, be underpinned by research and development, have shared values and beliefs, and be fair and inclusive.

The key point I’m trying to make is that these constituent parts are very idealistic. And if you put all of them together in a big pot in an environment, mix them all together, you’ve got a recipe for success.

If you read research and some of the books that are published, the other thing this is predicated on is a charismatic leader, who puts all of these things into a bucket, mixes them up and generates this amazing elite performance culture and environment.

One of the things that the environments are underpinned by is a culture of excellence. At its foundation, a culture of excellence places a balanced emphasis on both the person and the performance dimensions.

The person dimensions are factors that influence things like player development and performance. Those will be things like relationships, motivation, happiness, fulfilment, safety and welfare.

From a performance perspective, you’ve got things that bring about the actual development, so things like leadership and vision, coaching excellence, integration of sports science and medicine, and also facilities (physical facilities and the built environment), which I think get broadly missed when we talk about culture and elite performance environments.

The actual training environment is often overlooked. When you put those two things on a continuum, person and performance, you can develop a matrix, which is what I’m presenting you with today. And you can envision performance in this matrix.

If you’ve got an environment that is characterised by a culture of inclusion, you often have a history of poor or mediocre performances, or where winning isn’t the priority, but strong to moderate engagement of the individuals within your environment.

This is often like a youth development environment or potentially an Academy environment. A culture of harassment is where the emphasis is on performance rather than personal engagement. And that’s where you get performance at the expense of personal consequences.

I would argue that that culture of harassment was perhaps characteristic of Team GB in the Olympic and Paralympic movements in historical times, which generated the need for UK Sport to develop the winning strategy.

If you’ve got a culture of apathy, this is ultimately a dysfunctional environment. And, trust me, I’ve worked in many of these where there’s neither a focus on the personal or the performance environment or characteristics. 

The sweet spot, when you look at this conceptually, is this culture of quality where both the personal and the performance elements are prioritised and you consistently achieve improvements in both.

And that generates, across both dimensions, sustained high performance within the environment that you’re working in. But my question to you is, how easy is this to generate in the environments that you all work in, in the macro environment of professional football and the micro environment of your club?

Elite performance cultures: The reality

For me, this is a seductive promise of perfection. It’s a seductive promise of harmony. It’s largely empirically unmerited and it’s unlikely to be fulfilled. 

So that’s my challenge to you. All of these idealistic things are ultimately unachievable in the way that they’re presented. The reason for that is sporting environments are complex, they’re volatile and they’re ridden with conflict. There’s no getting away from that.

And they are characterised by unique flows of power. That is the old hard reality of what the majority of us are faced with. So we’ve got lots of things telling us that in an ideal world this is the culture and the environment that you need to generate.

But it’s actually largely out of our reach. The reason is that we face constant challenges in our environments – certainly I face them in my environment. One of my biggest bugbears is the pseudosciences that perpetuate in first-team football – in all of football in fact.

The desire for quick fixes, the power of charismatic marketing. We love to jump on a bandwagon of something that we think we’re going to do differently with very little empirical support or research support.

It’s like the next big thing, the next project, the next buzzword, the next technology, all being sold to us. Once you get what people term as cultural architects or influencers jumping onto that bandwagon, it’s like a skittle effect where everybody follows suit.

It’s certainly not evidence-based, certainly not performance-orientated and definitely not science backed. So the environments that we work in are characterised, dominated, by pseudosciences. Even in my current environment we’ve got practices, we’ve got equipment, we’ve got technology that fits into that category and we generate this placebo effect which also has a powerful effect on performance, but for the very wrong reasons.

Within the environments that we work in we are after quick fixes always, because we are results driven – certainly at the first team end of the environment. And the working processes that generate certainty, that generate scientific robustness, take a long time.

So that paradox, that balance, is really quite challenging. You know an elite performance culture, that is science backed, that is empirically robust, but you’re unable to achieve that, because people are demanding quick fixes, because results are driving that demand.

Where do you go? Do you bypass an elite performance culture at the expense of those quick fixes? How do you balance those competing demands in terms of the macro influences of the sport, on our culture, on our environment?

Things like transfer windows and player trading create an environment where it’s really very difficult to be player centric, to be holistic, to be caring, to be human and humane. 

You might have a player that just lands at your club and you’ve got to try and integrate them in no more than half a day. Or you’ve got players outgoing – somebody else has made a decision to sell a player and you see them one morning and then you don’t see them for the rest of the season until your team plays against them.

That’s not somebody who has left your environment or your club well. And it’s certainly not player-centric behaviour. But the macro influences of the sport are generating these challenges. So it’s really difficult to get your recipe book for elite performance cultures and actually replicate that in practice.

Things like inter-squad competition for places generate conflict. It’s natural that it does. So the fact that you think you’re after a harmonious environment because that is an elite performance culture is short sighted and perhaps not the reality of what we’re faced with.

Societal change in communication and feedback

I think one of the interesting things for me as a psychologist is the influence of societal trends in communication and feedback. I’ve seen generations of people come through education and development.

Some of us have been through the sort of brutal end of that, where feedback is tough, it’s challenging, it’s difficult to take. And then a whole generation of individuals have been through a system that rewards participation and perhaps mediocre performances.

Nobody’s ever been told no; nobody’s been faced with the challenge of hearing honest and brutal feedback, because it might upset them. So we’ve perhaps got a generation of individuals within our clubs now that are not used to receiving feedback in the way it was delivered previously.

And I see a trend of people that are bypassing the opportunity to have an open and honest conversation because they’re not confident in delivering it and not confident that the individual can actually take that feedback.

We basically end up not saying what we want to say, not giving feedback that is particularly developmental, because it’s too difficult. So those societal trends and norms and problems delivering honest feedback create a problem for us in actually establishing an elite performance environment.

The hours of work, the relentless fixture scheduling means that staff welfare and wellbeing is not a characteristic of the environments that we work in. 

Is it a bit of a dream? What are we doing to try and enhance staff welfare and wellbeing?

When you’ve got a fixture every three to four days and you’re traveling around the country and you’re not prioritising rest and recovery, there is more often than not a lack of cohesion in teams and tensions. It’s like a rollercoaster. 

There is no harmony that exists consistently over a period of time in elite high performance professional sport.

Cultural change

In terms of culture change, I think one of the only things that characterises football, in my experience, is a constant state of change and evolution. Culture change is lengthy – it’s a long-term process and is really complex and very, very difficult.

How do we generate culture change? Do we actually want to generate culture change? Is culture change necessary? In my experience, I think culture change is probably, a bit of an exaggeration. I think when you arrive into an environment there are elements of the culture of the environment, the performance culture of the environment, that you might want to keep.

There are things that have served the club or your colleagues well in relation to where the club has been, how it survived, where it’s headed. So for me it’s about cultural adaptation or evolution, not culture change, because I think that’s overselling things.

In order to adapt the culture or evolve the culture, a needs analysis is a really important way of addressing what’s in front of you and what you think needs to change. For me, the idealistic kind of research and literature side of culture needs to be adapted.

What can we do?

We need to be honest with ourselves that this kind of shining example of elite performance culture is never going to be achievable in the environments that we work in. What can we actually do under those constraints?

For me, it’s about establishing sustainable attitudes and values that underpin behaviour. And you recognise that in every situation you’re not going to be able to address or gain the ideal response. So you have to be adaptable and flexible.

If it’s done for the right reasons, with the right attitude, you can say that you are in an elite performance culture. For me, one of the most important things is establishing an environment with mutual respect, so that every exchange and conversation, every decision, has respect at its core, but constant challenge is encouraged.

That constant challenge is effectively undertaken with ease in an environment that is characterised by psychological safety.

But again, that’s an idealistic situation, because there will be times when individuals need to protect themselves, there’ll be times when they’re under pressure, there’ll be times when their job’s at risk. 

So can you really expect to deliver an environment with psychological safety against the backdrop of the macro culture of football and all of those constant challenges?

If there was one thing that characterises my experience of elite performance culture, it’s critical thinking. Critical thinking is s a superpower. Asking the right questions, challenging in the right way, making sure that you’re making the right decisions for the right reasons, asking those really difficult questions and having the confidence to do that.

Critical thinking has got to be number one on the list of an elite performance culture. Why are we doing this? Is it going to generate benefit? Who’s best to deliver it? Are we confident of the research that underpins this? Why don’t we know this? 

All of those things and having the confidence to do that. Lots of people will say to me, ‘Well, I can’t critically challenge something because I don’t know what questions to ask.’ 

I think that’s a really cheap cop out, actually. Everybody has got questions to ask and the confidence to do that needs to be role modelled and reinforced.

I think humility within an elite performance culture and environment is important. Not everybody has the answer, nor can we expect to have the answer. I think the best course of action for me is the best available evidence at the time for the right individual.

There are times when we’ve got performance questions in the environment that I work for and I want the answers now. In reality, you’re never going to be able to generate that because you need to be able to have an answer now or a decision now. But the answer, the right answer, is going to come in three years time when you’ve completed a really detailed, well designed, well executed research project.

So what is your compromise? How do you navigate that situation where the demands are intense, but your time is poor, you don’t have the time to be able to do that in the best possible way.

Coming from a background of academia, I often describe myself as a reformed academic. When you’re in that environment, you’ll be told that research drives practice. Actually, practice should drive research every time.

Generating those links with individuals that can answer questions in the most informed, most robust way is really important.

For me, an elite performance culture is characterised by brutal honesty, but with high empathy. If you ask me a question, you know you will get the honest answer, no matter how difficult it is to deliver or to hear.

Why have I been dropped? Why have I not been selected? Why am I not going to feature in next weekend’s team? You need to be able to hear that honesty, otherwise we are doing you a disservice.

Why are we not giving you that promotion? Why are you not getting a pay rise? Why are we not introducing this new technology that you’ve been promoting for the last three months? 

Brutal honesty, for me, is one of the key constituents of an elite performance environment. I think we’ve all got to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge the nuances of the game that we all know and love and work in.

And we need to understand that that needs agility and acceptance and we all need to stop being so idealistic about all of the things we think are important.

They are important, but are we actually going to deliver them in a way that makes an input. Or is this a compromise? Is this accepting what we’ve got and working within those constraints that the environment sort of leads us to?