Episode 11: Staff Teams in Sport – What Should They Look Like?
What makes for the dream staff team?
Lorena Torres and Dave Tenney join us on the podcast to figure out the dark art of putting together a support staff.
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Behind every high performance athlete is a sprawling network of support staff. Physios, coaches, performance analysts, sports scientists, the list goes on and on. So what does the dream staff team look like? How can we find the right spread across disciplines, the perfect number of people, the ideal hierarchy and structure, and get everyone working together well to give the athletes the best chance of success?
On today's episode, host Professor Sam Robertson has got two expert guests with a tonne of experience in building exceptional staff teams.
First up is Lorena Torres – Performance Coordinator for the Spanish National Basketball Team, formerly the Performance Director for the Philadelphia 76ers and Sport Scientist with the San Antonio Spurs.
Next, he chats to Dave Tenney – High Performance Director for Austin FC, and formerly holding the same role for NBA's Orlando Magic and Major League Soccer's Seattle Sounders.
Together, Sam, Lorena and Dave deep dive into what people, practice and processes need to be in place for an optimal staff team.
Full Episode Transcript
11. Staff Teams in Sport – What Should They Look Like?
Intro
Sam Robertson: Behind every high performance athlete is a sprawling network of support staff - physios, coaches, strength coaches, performance analysts, the list goes on and on - each working backstage towards two basic common goals, improve the athletes performance and keep them healthy.
[00:00:18] So if money was no object, what would the dream staff team look like? Although it's tempting to hire every kind of specialist we can think of, a larger support team is not necessarily more effective. As the saying goes, too many cooks spoil the broth. And when it comes to support teams, going overboard on the number of practitioners can muddy the lines of communication, making role clarity and decision-making difficult.
[00:00:43] Of course, it's not just about numbers. The spread across disciplines, the structure and the hierarchy of the team, and the qualities of the individuals themselves matter enormously. And in reality, sporting organisations are all bound by financial, logistical and cultural constraints that dictate their hiring decisions.
[00:01:02] So how do we answer the tough questions? Like what ratio of physiotherapists to strength and conditioning coaches? How do we choose between an expert technician versus a master of soft skills? How important is the overall makeup of the team, from diversity of training and experience, to their demographics and personality? And of course, how do we actually know when these teams are doing a good job?
[00:01:24] I'm Sam Robertson and this is One Track Mind.
Interview One: Dr Lorena Torres
[00:01:33] Hello and welcome to One Track Mind, a podcast about the real issues, forces and innovations shaping the future of sport. On today's episode, we're asking: Staff teams in sport - what should they look like?
[00:01:47] My first guest is Dr. Lorena Torres. Lorena has plenty of experience working in high performance teams. Currently the Performance Coordinator for the Spanish national basketball team, Lorena previously held roles as the Performance Director for the Philadelphia 76ers, and as a Sports Scientist with the San Antonio Spurs. She has also worked with FC Barcelona basketball and handball, along with the Spanish national swimming team.
[00:02:16] To add to the list, she's also an Adjunct Fellow at Victoria University here in Melbourne, with her research focusing on team sports performance, leadership in sport and practical applications of technology and science. Lorena, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:02:32] Lorena Torres: Hi Sam, thank you for having me, it's my pleasure.
[00:02:35] Sam Robertson: Now, before we get into the main question of this episode, around what high performance staff teams should or could look like, I think it's worth establishing upfront what we mean by a staff team and also what some of their overarching objectives typically are.
[00:02:51] To me, when I think of a high performance staff team, my mind tends to turn towards a group of practitioners from various disciplines working together to really achieve, kind of, one or two goals. It's either improving the performance of the athletes that they're working wit, and/or preventing injury. And I know it's a little bit more detailed than that, but overarching, they're the two main goals that most teams have.
[00:03:16] Sometimes this is daily collaboration in the same work environment. And other times, of course, there's a remote aspect to that depending on the sport. And the disciplines that come to mind for me are things like coaching, physiotherapy, strength and conditioning, psychology, nutrition, sports science - although perhaps we could have a conversation that some of the above roles actually all sit under the umbrella of sports science. And then of course we have some other roles that can vary both in their level of uptake or their scope depending on the sport. So the mind turns to biomechanics, skill acquisition, specialist coaching, performance analysis, which is of course a role that's changed dramatically in the last few years, which we might talk about. Have I missed anyone there that comes to mind for you?
[00:04:02] Lorena Torres: Well, depending on how you want to structure the performance department, the way that you have described it to me is more the medical and performance department. And you mentioned that you were questioning should the sports scientists like oversee or should these disciplines be under the umbrella of sports science, I like to think that sports science is a connector, is a way of doing things, is a philosophy of practicing your job, rather than an overseeing umbrella term. So I would like to put it below that, it's the base where other disciplines should base their values and philosophy. Or as a connector, so in the centre of different disciplines, or as a base of a program.
[00:04:56] Now, you were mentioning different disciplines. It really depends because, as we know, performance is multi-disciplinary and depending on the sport, some disciplines are going to have more impact or load, or they're going to be more important to the decision-making process. For example, I am not an expert in baseball, but I'm sure all the skill acquisition, biomechanics, movement efficiency, are going to be in the centre of the program where you mentioned them as like, oh, maybe there are like satellites. But for example, in basketball, which I am way more used to, and it's where my latest experience comes from, physiotherapy, strength and conditioning, recovery, nutrition, recovery, recovery, recovery, are some of the pillars of the program, right?
[00:05:45] So the disciplines I think is going to be a bit depending on the sport. The professionals that cover those areas of expertise, it's going to depend, in my opinion, a lot on the way that you want to construct and build that team. We have talked about this in the past, Sam, like a specialist versus generalist.
[00:06:07] I like hybrids. Hybrid positions where the strength coach knows about nutrition, knows about biomechanics, because the strength coach is in charge of movements. And if you want to develop hypertrophy, you're going to have to have conversations with the player and the nutritionist about, this is what you should be eating before and after and your protein shake should look like this. So the number of people and the profile of the people is really going to depend on how leadership build that team.
[00:06:40] Sam Robertson: It's an interesting way that you talked about sports science there and I think I prefer that to what I said, actually. It can be the glue. It can be the conduit for people having the same conversations. And I think sometimes when I see friction in staff teams it's often because there's not that shared understanding of sports science or sports performance, even. And I think the classic ones we think of are coaching versus high performance teams. Yeah and I guess coaches could be part of that or are part of that. But often they're coming from training that's very different to a strength and conditioning coach or a sports scientist.
[00:07:17] And the other one that we of course see quite regularly as well as his physiotherapy and some of the other sports science disciplines. And again, not saying one is right or above and beyond the other, but they're coming from a different perspective a lot of the time, in terms of their training. So I think there's positives and negatives to that, as you mentioned.
[00:07:36]You've mentioned that there around the generalist and the specialist, and I think it's worth picking up on that now. I'm really interested that in sports where there's multiple people in the same role. And I think that's a really interesting question in terms of, you know, if I look at Australian football here, for example, we have up to eight or nine coaches maybe working with the same group of 30 or 40 players, the question does arise. how homogenous do you want that group to be? Do you want them all to be generalist or do you have the ability to have some of them as being specialists. Now, you know, it might be very good for the team to have a group of specialists in there, but it might be less good for the individual, they might limit their future employability if they have too narrow a skillset. So it's almost like maybe one thing that is good for the team may not be good for the individual.
[00:08:28] Is that something you've seen other areas apart from coaching? Again, it's a very sports specific problem, isn't it? Because some sports really only have the ability to have one person. I mean, we spoke to Lisa Alexander last year from netball and she talked about in her early career, leading the Australian national team, she had to do, you know, the strength coach role and the psychologist role and the kind of head coach role. So it, does depend on the resourcing, doesn't it?
[00:08:54] Lorena Torres: Yeah. So going backwards to your question, that happened exactly the same to me in Spain, right? When you have less resources, you have less human resources, you have to be multitasked. So you find yourself being the strength coach, a sport scientist, a nutritionist, giving a massage if you have to before a swimming race. Like whatever you have to do to help these people and your players, right? But the moment that we are talking about high level professionalism - AFL, NBA, NHL - like high level, the staff should be composed by more than one person, right? Because the goal is to be successful, whatever successful means for that team, develop guys, winning championships, being a contender, whatever successful means. I don't think at high level you can have one or two people.
[00:09:47] Now, when you build a team, it's super interesting, and I've been studying a lot about this, how to build teams, you have to find that right number that you were mentioning because you have to provide the players the best service that you can, but sometimes having too much people generates frustration inside the staff and fear. And the moment you have fear and egos it's not a good combo for a working environment. So that's in the middle of your question.
[00:10:19] Final part, generalist or specialist, I think for operating in a professional team, people should have a specific strength, but being able to communicate and talk about other disciplines or areas. So a PT probably is going to take care of maintaining certain aspects of the body and if there is an injury, they're part of the first part of the rehabilitation. However, I think a good strength coach will have enough skills and knowledge to take part of very early in the rehab and take over from them while the PT can still keep an eye on that and oversee the progress, you know. So there are two different specialties and strengths there, and there is a moment where both have to be blended and that's the beauty of hiring the right people with the right mindset. People that are going to be willing to be super strong at what they know, but be able to not have the control all the time and let other people that are really good at what they do, do other things.
[00:11:35] I believe that you have to hire the best people that you can with talent and let them do what they do what they're good at. For example, you might have the head of the strength coaching being super good at soft skills, and they usually are, connecting with the players, you know, like the music, the testosterone in the weight room, all that connection that they have, but maybe he's not the right guy to do the testing on the force plates because he doesn't have that background knowledge. Let the assistant strength coach or even the intern or the sports scientist do that because that's going to be his strength and use the combination of both of your powers to deliver the best product.
[00:12:20] The problem is, as you were saying, when there are collisions or people are territorial and this is my strength I'm going to do the force plates because I'm in charge. And it's very difficult to educate people to let things go, for the good of the team, especially people in powerful positions by hierarchy, director of something, director for sports science, no that's my role, well but you're already super busy doing other things, let other people shine.
[00:12:52] Sam Robertson: So when I'm listening to you talk there, I'm reminded of the old conundrum about structure versus people, and that's not a sport problem that's a management problem anywhere, but it sounds like you're advocating for, and I don't want to put words into your mouth, but you're advocating for getting the best available talent in, and maybe the structure either follows that or the structure of the organisation, or the staff team in this case, comes at the same time. Do you have a comment on that?
[00:13:20] I mean, that's a tricky problem because bringing in the best available talent also sometimes means that people might have a shelf life at an organisation. They might really only be there for a short period of time before moving on. And of course, if that happens, and you don't have the structure in place, then you really are starting again. And some sports we see that a lot in obviously. Other sports, we don't see that much at all. Is there a magic formula there or is it really depending on the sport?
[00:13:48] Lorena Torres: It's a really good question. My answer would be, I think you have to have the idea of the structure first, because when you're building a team, you're trying to provide solutions and services for the team and the players, right? So your reflection is what do I need to provide the best service, then you're thinking about the structure. So I think you have to have which type of roles, which type of skills do we need, and then when you're doing the hiring process, because I've done a lot of hiring process for my past two teams, then is when you discover talent and you see, okay, I was looking for an assistant strength coach who is also, I can see this guy also having projects in sports science, involved in these projects or involved in these areas or connecting with these people.
[00:14:45] I think you need the structure because that's your reflection of what you want in your program. And then when you are looking for the talent, how you're gonna use that specific person and their strengths. And you were saying, okay, but then do we look for a generalist or a specialist? How you do that? Because if you have specialist people, they might get frustrated if they don't have enough jobs or enough tasks, right? Because if I were building a team, I would like the best possible people, and for that you need a really good level of expertise.
[00:15:22] Now, there is also a lot of tasks in a professional team where you have to do things that you probably, if you're a top, top, top, top, top person in the world, are not willing to do. So, if you can have a super good top person, for example, nutritionist, but with good soft skills, is going to connect with the players, is going to do menus, is gonna contact the hotel for set up things, a lot of administrative tasks too. And then you have a case where you have a player that has a particular need. I think having networking and super specific experts in things that are part of your external team is huge, because then you can go to that person, your trusted person for gut microbiota question, very specific high level topic, for that particular player. And that person can help you, be part of the equation to solve that problem, without having to be a full time person in your team.
[00:16:28] Sam Robertson: I would agree with all of that and I would definitely agree that structure should come first. And I think sometimes the reason why it doesn't is organisations aren't good at playing the long game, or they're happy to kind of pass the buck of a decision downstream to whatever the next administration might be.
[00:16:46] I think the risk with structure coming first is, of course, what we just talked about a little bit then, when maybe a role doesn't fit someone after a while, they either outgrow that role or they get bored and then they want to move on. And of course the other circumstance that can arise is, you have a very, very good person that's very unique in their skill set and if they decide to move on they actually aren't replaceable because they have such a unique skillset and that's when the structure can fall down. Because again, if you have that person in there, you can't replace them. So you need to then change your structure again. And that's where it can get a little bit tricky.
[00:17:21] But I wanted to zoom out a little bit again, in terms of what we think team structures should and could look like, you know, now and into the future. We talk a lot about technology on this show, particularly how that's changing jobs and you yourself have worked across, I think you've got an interesting perspective here because you've worked in individual sports, like golf, swimming, tennis, but also team sports like handball and more recently basketball. Are there some commonalities across sports or there some things that you've seen in your career that are untouchable in the way that teams set up their high performance team departments, like the number of coaches, or some form of hierarchy, or staff confinements. And when I say confinements, I mean being confined to the back office or the front office. What's some examples of dogma, or some examples of things that you'd like to see change in, in high performance team structures around the world?
[00:18:16] Lorena Torres: In my experience individual sports and team sports are different. Usually the individual sports are more one-on-one so you have probably less staff, but they're very, very connected with the athletes. And if you have more staff, it's because it's part of a bigger picture of the organisation. For example, Olympic sports, you might have your coach if you're a swimmer, and then the nutritionist is part of the Olympic training centre, like you guys had in the AIS. You know, you have a bigger structure for multiple sports, even if they are individual sports.
[00:18:54] In team sports and pro sports I think the staffs are bigger or got bigger lately. And it's tricky to find the right balance with the number of people that has to be there. I think providing a good service, the best service possible in the team, is the goal, but more and more top players are having their satellite teams around them and how you integrate that in the teams, it's interesting to see and manage. That's part of the answer to your question.
[00:19:28] Now, what should be changing? Changes usually take time. And again, when there is fear and egos it's really, really hard to change things, but I think that's what I proposed when I was being interviewed for the position of Director of Performance. My proposal was we need to have less hierarchy in teams. We have to work more at the same level. It's tricky because then you put the assistant strength coach very close to the head of strength coach, to put an example, right? So, the fear of losing power or information power is not well received by everybody, but it's what I believe is the best for the team, because there is more openness transparency, communication, sharing, fulfillment.
[00:20:21] So I think one of the things that if I could be in charge of anything, a team, I would build and support more horizontal structures and less hierarchy. And what makes the hierarchy? Like if you have a formal horizontal structure, you anyway are going to have hierarchy because better and more prepared people are going to be more involved in decision-making processes, but it's less perceived from players, for example, as hierarchy, which gives power to everybody. So that's one of the things that I would mention, how you give power and roles to people that is not very vertical.
[00:21:07] And then at the beginning you were mentioning, what do you do with people that is really good and wants to move on and then you lose that person and those skills, and how you manage people. And, you know, I've been reading a lot about building teams and managing teams. And I realised, I read something that I really like that is a very simplistic way now, but there are two type of people, again, they're simplistic, there's superstars and rock stars. And I didn't realise about that before reading this book. And there's people that doesn't want to be promoted all the time.
[00:21:47] Like somebody that has been in the team for 10, 15 years, they might not want to be like, then the director of the medical, you know, and then the VP, like they're happy doing what they're doing because they like to be with the players. Now you have superstars, which are those type of people that needs to be promoted every two, three years. And I wanted to mention this, Sam, because you were saying, I understand that the structure should come first, but that's tricky with how you manage people. But, you really give a thought about structure first and you assume, and you know that there's going to be people that are going to want to be promoted and people that are not excited about promotions and more responsibility.
[00:22:31] When you hire people, you have to add that question and you have to know the people that you have in your team, because if you want ambitious people that want promotions, but not from a negative connotation, it's just that they are eager to grow and learn and progress, you have to consider that in your structure. Otherwise you get frustrated people that want to leave.
[00:22:54] Sam Robertson: Yeah, and I think we've probably all seen examples of that or heard examples of that in all sorts of sports. Probably the last question I wanted to spend a little bit of time on today, and you've kind of touched on it a little bit there, was around what would you do if you were setting up a high performance performance team or staff team from scratch? You know, for a new franchise or a new institute of sport that came about. And you've touched on some things there, but I think there's a couple more we could explore. I wanted to come back to something you just said then as well around shared decision-making, because I think that's a, it's not a new concept at all, but I think it's a really important one for sport to embrace. More than it has to date, and I'm generalising of course.
[00:23:32]Another term or another word you've used a couple of times is ego, and I think it is as simple as that a lot of the time, isn't? It's simply an ego thing or holding onto a structure that has been in place for a certain period of time in a given sport. So again, this comes back to something we've talked about over the last 10 or so minutes, which is that structure really being important, that that comes first. And if there's a culture of shared decision-making and a rock star or a superstar comes in, as you mentioned, they know that they've got to work within those parameters in that organisation. And again, if they want to work outside of those, they need to move on somewhere else, I suppose.
[00:24:09] So coming back to my question I just asked, are there other things that you would set up in a team, starting from the start? I think role clarity is a really important consideration in that. I see a lot of roles in some sports where they're put in place on the whims of a player or just because someone else has a structure like that. Having very clear roles and very clear KPIs that are tied to that role. And I know we can't measure everything about a role. I think that, you know, the importance of being a good person and being someone that players or athletes can have a conversation with, that's hard to measure, but the more of that we have the better, I think. I'm not going to pick on any particular roles here, but I think there are roles where the clarity, to me at least, about what they're doing to make an athlete better is not there all the time.
[00:24:58] Lorena Torres: I would say that my main thing I would spend a lot of time, well I already did, but you asked me starting from scratch, values, values, values. If I learned something about leadership and building teams and managing managing teams lately, it's there has to be common values. And it sounds very probably poetic or far from reality, but it's true. Like it's true. If the value is transparency, you can't have people in your staff that have a meeting after the meeting and gossip and talking [behind] people's back because the core value is transparency. I'm not saying that that would be the main, but you know what I'm saying is like you have to think which are your values, what is your identity as an organisation, and then hire the people that fit there and not only fit, but belong to that program. So values, values, values.
[00:26:02] I think being right with the right amount of people is key. Too many people is not good. Too short is not good. So the right amount of people. I think diversity, it's important, and what I've learned about diversity, it's super interesting for me, is you can check the box of having a woman and having an Afro-American I'm having an Asian person, but if the three of them study in an American college and did their PhD in Victoria University, they are the same. You know what I'm saying? So diversity for me is even, if only 50% male, 50% female, even those females or those males have to have different backgrounds, different education, cultures, to be able to bring new things. If one of your values is innovation and forward thinking.
[00:26:58] That's what I think values is the base. If you want a traditional, old school, we have been doing the things this way for a long time organisation, then you don't have to think about diversity, because it's not part of your values. So values, structure of the department, and a good hiring process to find really good talent, which I don't think happens in pro sports. I think it's very networking, somebody knows somebody they trust, and that cuts all the talent that is out there and we haven't been able to discover because we don't have the opportunity. So at least those three, four points would be key for me.
[00:27:47] Sam Robertson: I'm glad you started talking about diversity then, because as you were talking about shared values, and whilst I agree with that, I think a danger when people are quite similar in their thinking, and I know that's different to their values, is that when that organisation or that structure or that team needs some innovation or disruption, let's use the word disruption, it's difficult to get that from within, isn't it, because if they've all come from the same background or even sharing the same values, that's sometimes a little bit tricky.
[00:28:19] But I think what you're saying is values, you know, you use some examples there, like transparency and not so much soft skills, but values that are inherent, that should run for the whole organisation, not just the high performance team. Once you've got those in place, then they're the commonalities across staff, but then the diversity of experience then allows you to make sure you do get that disruption. You keep yourself on your toes, make sure you're constantly looking to improve. And that's a hard thing to get though, isn't it? I mean, how many places are doing that well? It sounds like a really tricky thing.
[00:28:52] Lorena Torres: It's super hard because you bring a woman, because in the league there are no women, and you know, they're pushing the media, the social movements, we have to be more equality, blah, blah, blah, but then you put a woman in the middle of the mix and you don't support her, or you don't support African American person, and it's super hard. And again, that's why values are so important. If you want to go old ,school, fine, but then don't hire woman because she's going to likely suffer a lot. So values first and then, hey, fine, just let me know where I'm going.
[00:29:28]It's super hard because diversity and disruption - I love that word, I'm so happy that you speak English cause I can still learn from you - if you want disruption, if you are leadership, if you're management, and you want people challenging things to be better, they have to have support because otherwise people don't want to speak, because oh my god how am I going to be perceived by my peers or my superiors. Or it's if I say this, we're not doing this right, this is not the right approach, this program is not helping in recovering this guy from this injury. If you want that type of openness and transparency and communication, you have to have a system in place to support your people, and that's another tricky thing that I don't think happens all the time and that is when people use these shells and armors and they're just in protection and survival mode and that's not good either.
[00:30:24] Sam Robertson: Well, I always try and finish on an optimistic note. I'm not sure we've done that as well today, but I think there's a lot of takeaways here. You know, even when you were speaking then again, I keep coming back to that word 'structure' and I think, as we've discussed over the last little while, having that structure in place first and the shared values established first is really key and really crucial. And no one person is bigger than the organisation or the team. I think we all acknowledge that and we all say that, but sometimes it's easy to forget in practice, isn't it?
[00:30:54] Lorena Torres: Yes. And to finish from a positive point of view, at the very beginning, one of your first sentences was, well coaching probably is not the same and they should be like the same level. I really think that players come first, coaches then, and then we are very, very, very, very important, but we are part of something bigger than ourselves, and medical and performance staff, we are services, we serve. So we provide a service for the players and the coaches.
[00:31:27] And to finish with a positive point of view, I think because we are a service, we can help you guys, players and coaches listening. We can bring things to the table, that it's okay if we have some forces and strengths. So hopefully we see more and more pro sports and team sports and individual sports, I'm just saying because I'm more in team sports, where the medical and performance staff is valued and recognised, because we can really bring things and information and knowledge to the performance of the team.
[00:32:09] Sam Robertson: That is a much more positive note and thanks for finishing on that, you've done that better than I would have. Lorena, thanks for joining us on the show.
[00:32:16] Lorena Torres: Thank you! Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure always talking to you, Sam.
Interview Two: David Tenney
[00:32:25] Sam Robertson: Our next guest on the show is David Tenney. David is the High Performance Director of Austin FC in Major League Soccer. Prior to that, David spent nine years with the Seattle Sounders, where they made the playoffs for eight consecutive seasons and won the US Open cup four times. Switching lanes to the NBA in 2017, he took on the role of High Performance Director for Orlando Magic, before moving back into soccer and into his current role. As an ex professional footballer himself, with a Master's in exercise science performance enhancement and a Bachelor's in coaching science, David has built a real reputation for cultivating strong staff teams. David, thank you for joining us.
[00:33:07] Dave Tenney: Thanks for having me.
[00:33:09] Sam Robertson: We've just heard a little bit from Lorena on her take on this topic, it's a pretty broad one. She talked a lot about some things I think you might be really well-placed to expand on. So things like how sports science connects the high performance team, the generalist versus the specialist, a little bit about structure as well, and particularly flatter structure, which I'm really interested in your thoughts on considering you've spent a lot of time in your career as a high performance director. And then also a little bit about diversity, she touched on as well. Not so much diversity in ethnicity or race, but more so in diversity of backgrounds, and I know that's a topic you're certainly interested in some of your work and research.
[00:33:48] So there's a lot in all of that. Maybe one of the things we could kick off talking about is your experience on that structure side. So in particular, the flatter structure versus that high performance director role that you've held in a couple of different sports, most notably soccer and basketball. What do you think works well in that space?
[00:34:07] Dave Tenney: What I would say is, I'm currently in Austin prior to that, I was in the NBA for three years and then in MLS for nine years. Being in MLS for nine years I think allowed me to organically grow this department, this high performance department, over time, which I think led me to make lots of decisions and build out a staff in a way that I didn't really appreciate at the time. Right? And then if I fast forward then to my NBA experience, you walk into an MBA department and then you have the opportunity to build a staff how you'd like to, and you hire a bunch of specialists from different areas and then try to make a team out of them. I went in and I think some of my hiring strategies and kind of team building strategies that I put in place when I went into my role were done without really recognising the value, I think, of some of the lessons that I learned maybe in MLS and soccer without actually knowing that I was learning them.
[00:35:01] Because I think as you build a staff, when you grow and you're always asking the question of, okay we have these five to six different practitioners in these different areas, what's the next piece that we want? What's the next area that we need a specialist in? If you start and you think from the traditional, you know, a medical staff and then a strength coach and a sports scientist. And then most of us came from this strength and conditioning or fitness role into a high performance role, and then you have someone to maybe replace you with some of the stuff you do in the weight room, and then you bring someone in. Which is a lot different than having to fill eight positions in an NBA staff at a single time.
[00:35:41] So I think that you're always trying to have a group of people that can have complementary skill sets. I think that's easy to think about, but then how you actually piece together the backgrounds of those people, the educational backgrounds, the different experiences they might've had, and then try to put together a team that functions effectively. I mean, definitely that was a learning experience for me within the NBA, how to do that.
[00:36:08] And I think what I would say is going in, and this flows into the talk on diversity, like as I went into my role in the NBA, I was very enamored with the concept of a flat structure, with lots of different practitioners from a very diverse background. I'm thinking like if I've got a bunch of people who have really different experiences, really different backgrounds, a lot of what I would call cognitive diversity, then we can problem solve better. We have people placed in different areas with different skill sets that aren't overlapping and, you know, we can solve any sort of problem that comes across our plate.
[00:36:45] I found in practice, it didn't really work as effectively as I would have liked. And then since then, as you alluded to, I'm in the middle of my PhD and dissertation now on leadership competencies in high performance sport, and if you look at the research in cognitive diversity, it's a lot different than your Harvard Business Review articles that say, hey, the more cognitive diverse staff you have the better, because you problem solve better. If you really look at the research, there's definitely a sweet spot in amount of cognitive diversity and a team's ability to perform.
[00:37:23] What they found I think within the research is that if you have a certain amount of cognitive diversity, you might approach different problems in different ways, but you still share a common ground. And if you have too much cognitive diversity and you have, let's say one person that came from an academic setting and one person that came from a clinical setting and one person that came from a very heavy experiential setting, they may not have a common language and common perspective on things and may not be able to then acknowledge the other person's strengths. And when it comes down to really critical problem solving moments, they may not be able to problem solve together.
[00:37:58] That's where I think as a high performance director, putting together a staff is recognising that you want someone that's that sees things differently, but maybe not too differently from the rest of the staff.
[00:38:09] Sam Robertson: Listening to you speak then, I think of something that I spoke to Lorena about as well, we touched on very briefly, which is strategy versus structure and what comes first when you're building a team. And I know the example you gave then, they were quite different. You mentioned the word organic, being able to build a team over time and a stability that comes with having someone like yourself in a role for nine years, as opposed to coming straight in and having to make a lot of hires.
[00:38:35] I'm unashamedly a big advocate for having that strategy in place first. That probably comes as no surprise to you, being quite quantitatively minded, and systems and measurement and strategy all being things I spend some time on. But the example you gave then, the first example, of your initial role with the MLS is really an advocate for the opposite of that, it's organic, it's having a strong leader there, having the time and undoubtedly the freedom to build something over time that's really quite workable and quite successful, which it was. So it's funny, even though I advocate that there's constantly examples where stability is shown to be really important. And I think there is research on that in managers, as well as you probably read, in particular in football managers or soccer managers. I don't think I've read a lot about that about high performance directors, but you may have as part of your thesis dissertation.
[00:39:26] What would you do differently? If you had that opportunity again. Is it being more directed or more specific about what the team is working on and how they're going to be evaluated? Because it strikes me that cognitive diversity, as you mentioned, is great, and to an extent, but if you're bringing in someone from an academic background, for example, and they're not going to be spending much time at all, if, let's face it, no time at all on academic problems, is that going to be as beneficial as perhaps we'd think it would be? Does it just narrow your viewpoint a little bit by being more defined about the problems they're going to spend time on? Is that something you'd do differently? Cause that's what I was thinking when you were speaking.
[00:40:05] Dave Tenney: Yeah, and again, I think we're working in this kind of dynamic systems space as well, where you're also working in an NBA that is literally changing in front of your eyes, right? Where the high performance staffs and the medical staffs and the number of medical practitioners that the team's employing seem to be exponentially increasing. So the demands that the athletes have in terms of athlete care, were also radically changing, so you're trying to recruit a group of people that can conquer some of the problems that you have as a staff.
[00:40:42] It's interesting where one of the paradigms in US sport, you know, if you go to a lot of US colleges and you look at their strength coach, it's a fairly large cliche. You go to a lot of collegiate strength coaching programs, and you look at the head strength coach. And that he hires younger strength coaches that they, he looks like them, they think like him, they read the same books as him, they have the same programming mindset as him, and they're essentially younger copies of him.
[00:41:10] And that group will work as this kind of robust team that doesn't challenge each other. They know how they work. They feel like their methods work very well. And they can apply that to a group of collegiate American football players year after year after year. But now that's not the NBA. When you have sports science, and strength conditioning, and medical, and nutrition, and psychology, and all these kinds of different areas of practitioners that have all these vastly different backgrounds. And when you sit down in a room together you have to problem solve together.
[00:41:40] Then it comes into what is the role of experience within professional athletics, experience within that particular sport? As I came in, you know, in the NBA role, I would say I almost purposely tried to recruit staff members that had not previously been working in the NBA, because I, again, I thought things were changing so quickly that I wanted people that could adapt to the new NBA. And so I think, you know, looking back having maybe more people th at had experience within the league, might?
[00:42:12] But having said that if someone has been in a certain league for 10 years, then there's also, at times, there can be a lack of adaptability to those people because they think they know what works. They think they know how the athletes are, how medical care should be, how all these certain ways of doing things should be, because that's just the way it's been done for 10 years. And there's never a guarantee that someone that's been working within a league for a certain amount of time will have the malleability to change, to do things in this kind of new way. As again, we talk about this organic evolution of a staff within a league that is also organically growing and developing as well.
[00:42:51] Sam Robertson: Again, like so often, it really does differ between leagues and different types of sports, and you mentioned some of the differences there, particularly in professional basketball in the United States, at least. And you mentioned change, the change that's been happening in that particular sport, but it's been happening in football and lots of other codes as well. How would you like it to look? You gave us some glimpses of your thoughts on that then, but where could this go in the future? Is it just going to keep growing? I mean, there's gotta be a limit, I suppose. We know some sports now have more staff than athletes, which seems a little crazy to me, but it is becoming increasingly common.
[00:43:28] Is it going to be more consultants plugging in and out to environments, more specialists coming in? It feels like if that is the case, the high performance director role is actually really important to ensure there's that synergy between the information coming in, all those things that you spoke about. Or is it, are these roles actually embedded internally? We know some franchises now, for example, are getting so big with youth teams and women's teams. Do we see more generalists coming in, who have oversight across maybe 10 programs of work, which I suppose is much more similar to the college situation you just mentioned. Where do you think it will go and where would you like it to go?
[00:44:05] Dave Tenney: Again if you look at some of the research on, most high performance director models originated from the national Olympic associations, first and foremost. And so they became in a lot of ways very strategic type roles, where we're setting up, going into Olympic games and major tournaments and, you know, kind of, how you're going to get food and chefs to certain tournaments, like thinking at that level, strategically. And then as you translate the high performance director role to team sports, it was more managing, when it started these smaller teams around the team, right? So your medical, sports science, performance groups.
[00:44:46] And now I think again, as has you alluded to, as staffs have gotten bigger, and I think there's probably a limit, when you think that your staffs have to ultimately often interact with athletes, the more staff members you have around the athletes, the more likelihood there can be a miscommunication of being territorial, ego, things like that.
[00:45:10] To your point, I do see a world where you have maybe potentially a smaller group that does operate around athletes, with the use of consultants for certain topics, with also affiliations with university systems. I mean, clearly within the U S that's not been a large thing yet where professional teams do affiliate with the university around research-driven, ideas topics, concepts. I do see that changing and that may be something strategically that, you know, is that the new role of the high performance directors? To manage these consultants and doctors and universities kind of around the team?
[00:45:48] But I do think, yes, there is a limit to how big a staff can be that does have to operate around coaches and athletes. Like I think there does have to be a limit to that. And some of the places where it's gone wrong is because people are people and there's personalities and getting personalities around athletes, when everyone wants to be acknowledged for doing good work. And the more people you put around these athletes in these high profile settings, then also people like to be acknowledged and well thought of and rewarded. And you can spend a lot of time managing all those aspects of humanity of the staff that gets put around athletes.
[00:46:26] Sam Robertson: Yeah and there's so many degrees of freedom that can go wrong. You mentioned the word 'dynamic' and when you're talking about a high performance sport environment and it does change over time and sometimes a really short time scale, sometimes longer time scales.
[00:46:40] You made a great point about communication then and touch points to the athlete, which is not something I was thinking about, but it's a really important one, practically speaking, I think, and I can think of some examples where that has gone wrong. With that in mind, what are some of the things or some of the characteristics of people then that you've seen in your career that have, not so much lasted the longest time in sport, although maybe I'm interested in that as well, but have been most successful? I mean, I know when people talk about this topic, they invariably talk about the soft skills, like communication and all of those things, and they are important, but I think they're easy things to think of straight away. I've probably spoken to a handful of people in the last, and this seems to be getting more regular, but a handful of people in the last year or so that are moving on from roles in high performance sport. I'm not going to say it's a young woman's or man's game, but that is a term I've heard. So what are those characteristics of the people that are not only lasting the longest, but actually having success?
[00:47:41] Dave Tenney: From a soft skills standpoint, you're saying?
[00:47:43] Sam Robertson: Well, I mean, I think that's an obvious place to start. I think that is important, but they obviously have some level of resilience. I mean, the time on the road and the communication with athletes, we know that that's important, but does there need to be an element of vision there as well? That patience to grow? What are some other things that maybe you can remark on from your own career?
[00:48:02] Dave Tenney: There's definitely a stress resiliency. It's funny, there's limited research, although there is a little bit on the stress and anxiety experienced by high performance staff, because that is something to be acknowledged, because it is a lot of travel, without a lot of fanfare, away from families. And so there is definitely a stress resilience that I think, high performance staff members that last long periods of time, they have to have.
[00:48:29] But I think it's the ability to not take themselves too seriously at times. Because again, I think there is this kind of natural need for acknowledgement, and yet, you might have a general manager or technical director, or, you know, whoever your managerial position is, who may not tell you for six months, Hey, you're doing a great job. Right? Like a lot of high performance staff members don't hear for months on end, what a great job they're doing. And even sometimes, you know, the athletes themselves. There are some sports that have athletes that are very appreciative of the job that high performance staff do. There's other sports that they may make so much money that it's not necessarily second nature to these athletes to say, Hey, I really appreciate you, you're doing a great job.
[00:49:15] So I think the ones that last do a good job without having the need to be acknowledged for doing a great job, and maybe that comes with a self-confidence as well. It's easy to say, I mean, in most professions, if you have high levels of self-confidence and high stress resiliency, you're more likely to stay in that role. But yeah you definitely see that as there is more stress and as there is bigger stakes, bigger departments, more staff interactions that, you know, I don't have to take myself too seriously, I don't have to be acknowledged, I know that I'm good, those are the members that ended up staying on.
[00:49:48] As well as I think, one thing that I always look for in younger practitioners is, this natural curiosity to look deeper into things, right? Again, we talk about dynamic systems and this professional environment being a dynamic system you're looking at evolving in front of you. Like what's the next question we need to ask? What's the next area we need to get better at? What's the next thing that is really not good enough in what we're doing? Right? And so it's always that next question you have to ask of your group. And I think that the people that last and thrive, know where they are now, but are also constantly assessing and figuring out one step ahead of everyone else. What's the next thing I have to pay attention to, because that's about to be important. And I think that's sometimes where people miss, they kind of sit back like, okay, we're good. But as you know, these leagues and teams are changing so quickly that you really have to be able to be a visionary and see how things are about to change.
[00:50:46] Sam Robertson: I'm really glad you mentioned that word 'curiosity', because that's something I wanted to talk about as well, in those individuals I was referring to earlier. Some of those, yeah you could probably put their departure from high performance sport down to the travel being too difficult away from family, but others, it's not that at all. It's the fact that they do have an underlying curiosity and maybe that's occupying more of their time than you'd like, in a high performance setting. And so some of those have actually left for research roles. That, to me, they're the type of people, particularly if they have very good practical skills, that we want in high performance sport. And I was going to ask you, whether we're doing enough to keep them in, in high performance sport, or whether we just have a shelf life?
[00:51:36] I think it's the former, but you mentioned then that it is different from different sports and I do still know a lot of people like that, that are still working in high performance sport, but invariably they're the ones that have very, very strong backing from leadership, from ownership even, and I think that's a key part of it. I would love to see more and more people like that remaining in high performance sport and flexible working arrangements, and I know that's not always possible, but that time on task to be able to think creatively, innovatively, spend time on thinking about something that's not just the next game. It's more of a comment than anything, but I'm not sure whether you've got anything to add to that, or whether you'd even agree with it.
[00:52:14] Dave Tenney: Yeah, but I would say that is that one of the emerging leadership competencies of a high performance director, is can I make space for these visionaries, curiosity seekers, these sports scientists that maybe need a little bit of space and time to go ask some different questions? And obviously some departments are linking with universities and you can maybe get it that way. But there are people that in-house that are asking more questions, and that goes back to maybe the generalist of the high performance director acquiring and working with managing these specialists, that knowing how to manage these specialists that do need to have extra time or maybe they don't travel with the team.
[00:52:58] And then going back to those people want to feel acknowledged and valued, and there are some times, again, whether it's NBA or NHL or major league baseball, you have game after game after game. It's very easy to get in the grind, the daily grind, and prepping for games, recovering for games, worry about the next game, where this curiosity can kind of get extinguished very, very quickly because you're just trying to get through the next game. And that's where I do think it's up to the high performance director to create this environment where these people can still thrive and search for what the next question is, what the next insight is, what's emerging out of what they're looking at.
[00:53:36] Sam Robertson: Yeah. I mean, you're doing a good job of convincing me that the high performance director role is really crucial when done well and maybe flat structure's not always the answer. I know you're not trying to do that, but you're selling it quite well.
[00:53:48] Dave Tenney: You said that flat structure's not the answer?
[00:53:50] Sam Robertson: Well, I mean, I don't think we've solved that today. I mean, it could be. I haven't seen it work that well very often. I think it's a nice thing to aspire to. Of course, the issue with the high performance director model is it really is contingent on getting the right person in and whatever we mean by the right person.
[00:54:11] But I think I mentioned it earlier, if you think about the best sporting organisations over periods of time, normally some of the hallmarks of them are some form of consistency, in either management and/or ownership or leadership roles, whether it's the coach and the high performance director. There are exceptions to that, but we do see some of the really big organisations that have had success have had that stability or that longterm, and sometimes that's strategic and sometimes it's just organic, as you mentioned at the start.
[00:54:42] Something I wanted to ask you about, which is a slightly different topic, but I think it does tie in here is, and it's a real interest of mine, is how we evaluate these teams. Obviously you have the really macro level wins and losses in pro sport or what counts and high performance teams are sometimes evaluated via anecdotes, but also just through physical performance, whether that's a valid assessment or not. And of course, injury rates as the other thing that they often hang their hat on. But they're really blunt measures to evaluate the impact of a person, as we might imagine, or even the department. Can that be done well, quantitatively, in your view? Or is it just too tricky because of some of the qualitative things we've spoken about, like communication? Is it something that we need more of in order to actually make sure we know who's doing a good job? I just said earlier that getting the right high performance director in, I mean, how would we even know that if we were not evaluating? So it's a tricky topic I think.
[00:55:42] Dave Tenney: Yeah, but again, I think we're talking about high performance director, high performance management. You know, if you look at traditional performance management and some of the concepts around, let's say, industrial and business performance management. So you're really looking at things like surveys and 360 feedback, and in some areas like that. To me, how do you know when a high performance department is working well is that they're communicating well, they're sharing, they're vulnerable together, or they can talk about what they think the team's doing well, what they think of the team's doing poorly. And that comes down to just open communication, which is still very cliched, like oh we've just got to communicate, but it's the quality of that communication, isn't it? So I think it is very qualitative cause you're really looking at how the practitioner experiences the team they're working with, the quality of the communication.
[00:56:36] I had not planned to talk about them feeling valued or acknowledged, but that seems to be a constant theme. But again like that they feel that they are valued, that their work is valued. Maybe that's where, without meaning to, like that's one of the key things that I keep coming back to is that how many practitioners go into high performance sport, and they're three, four, five years in, and they're working 60, 70 hours a week, and no one's really giving them the feedback that tells them whether they're doing well or not, except maybe in an end of year review, right? So I think again, one of the next competencies from a high performance director is can you continue this feedback loop of letting people know like what they're doing well, what they're not doing well? And that's not emotionally easy to have a group of 10, 12 people where you're consistently giving them high quality feedback, and then also talking to the athletes to see what the athletes' perceptions are of the work they're doing.
[00:57:29] These all tend to be more qualitative areas than quantitative areas, but you've can have the quantitative side of if you're doing regular surveys and you know, those are more subjective, but still, you can have written, scored, Likert scale surveys, you provide every, you know, every few months.
[00:57:46] Sam Robertson: I think I've spoken before about the homogeneity of coaches or the sameness of coaches in an environment, that they're bringing the same skillset to the table. And you just mentioned an example in college football strength coaches, which is quite similar, but thinking about that high performance director role and some of the things you've said today, can we see a world coming where people are coming from very, very different backgrounds into that role. If we're saying that so much of it is about the human side and communication side, I just wonder, we know a lot of high performance directors have a background in strength conditioning or physiotherapy, and then they might go and do an MBA or they might do something in leadership. But I just wonder whether the model could be flipped? Or whether that medical or high performance, sports science side is so important it can't be skipped. It's just a thought that occurred to me as you were speaking then that, yeah, I could see this model happening where people are getting plucked from very different roles into these positions and whether it would work or not.
[00:58:43] Dave Tenney: I think it could work, but I do think as long as they're understanding of the sport and the culture of the sport as well, right? And where some of these hires and the types of people you've mentioned has not gone well, and it's because the person doesn't necessarily understand the culture of the sport, and the culture of the coaches and the athletes. And even for me, there was a huge challenge being a lifelong soccer person and then going to the NBA for three years. And not even, it's not even like the difference in the culture, it's as much of me being so comfortable in the culture of soccer for my entire life and then going to something totally different in terms of the players and coaches and the terms they used and how coaches wanted to coach could not have been more different in some respects, right?
[00:59:31] And to bring someone in to manage that group, I mean, I would say they would probably have to have experience in pro sports at some level, because I think each sport has a different challenge in terms of the relationship between the high performance department and the coaching staff, but that is a key interaction that I also think in the role of the high performance director is critical to manage. In soccer it's fleshing out what you're doing daily on the field, let's say, but in basketball, it's very much how the team is going to practice and how they're going to travel, and you may not necessarily have a huge input at times in what the training content is, but you know when they're lifting weights and who might be in practice, out of practice, or limited in practice, and how to facilitate those conversations. Right? And I think there's also an art to facilitating those conversations between high performance director to coach that is really difficult to gain without a certain amount of experience in some of those roles.
[01:00:35] Sam Robertson: Yeah. And again, listening to that, I've used the term unicorn in the past as something that doesn't exist, but I think it does exist, it's just we're really talking about a very small number of people that can do that.
[01:00:49] Now, last question before I let you go, coming back into the MLS and you've touched on some of these already, but in this new role, in a very different circumstance, not so much what are you doing differently second time around in a different franchise, but what will you do differently? What are some of the things that you're going to try and put in place? Well certainly things that you can talk about anyway or you're happy to talk about in this forum.
[01:01:10] Dave Tenney: The NBA is a fantastic league and in some respects that I think that they do really, really well. And I think the individualisation of assistant coach to high performance practitioner or medical practitioner and kind of creating these little teams around the athletes is something that I'll definitely kind of take with me. And I think that if you look at an NBA franchise and they've got five assistant coaches and three or four physios and, you know, two or three strength coaches, and, each player might know that I've got, this is my physio and this is my strength coach and this is my sport science guy or massage person. I felt like one of the roles of the high performance director within the NBA is to create these smallish, three-men teams around each athlete. Right? So each athlete felt, again, important, taken care of, and that they knew what they had.
[01:02:02] And I think the interesting thing is going back to soccer, where soccer is such a team first philosophy, almost like across the board, that sometimes it's good to ask the questions like, well, are the individuals getting everything that they need? Like, I know we want to train, build up from midfield today, but there's the winger who's got to take guys on five, six times in a one-on-one situation a week, and is he getting what he needs to prepare for the game? Right? And I think that's what I found fascinating and really great about the NBA is that there was a level of individualisation. And I know there's plenty of debate around how NBA coaches teach skill and you could bring Damian Farrow on and do a whole nother podcast on skill acquisition of basketball players. But the reality is that you're spending a tremendous amount of time over the week and month to build skills, movement skills, strength, recovery, around each one of these athletes that I think part of it comes from the budgets and the high performance department sizes, but I think again that shows how if you do it right that there is a certain amount of individualisation that any team can have that is important in this dynamic between, you know, the collective versus the individual. And it's easy to get stuck at, like, everything is collective first and once we go on the practice field all that matters is the team and how you really separate things out and individualise as much as possible.
[01:03:30] Sam Robertson: I think that's a fantastic example and I think just full stop in sport that's one of the big challenges or big areas for improvment in most team sports. I don't, and I'm generalising, but I don't know if we've done that as well as we could have in terms of really giving the individual what they need. Not so much what they need, but what we know that they need to get better. It's really tricky and all sorts of areas. I think of practice, and you mentioned Damian there, practice is the tricky one. We've all seen those drills that really target a midfield area that leave the forwards or the defenders doing very little, and that's not a soccer thing, that's in rugby, that's in Australian football, in basketball as well, I'm sure.
[01:04:07] Dave Tenney: I was really thinking of back in the NBA where we were looking at the work around young players and where a 20 year old was and having discussions with the general manager. And the general manager is saying, well, our expectation is our coaching staff is going to move this guy from a 29% 3-point shooter in his rookie year to a 35% 3-point shooter by the time he's 23. And if he does that, then he'll learn his next contract because that's going to give value to the team. And then by the time he's 25, it should be 37, 38%, 3-point shooter. And to be able to quantitatively really have across the board, these marks in terms of the goals from player development was impressive, different than, you know, again, you just you don't have that conversation in soccer. You don't have that conversation from a quantitative perspective of this player, 20, what should he be quantitatively improving on by the time he's 23 to make himself a more marketable, valuable player.
[01:05:04] Sam Robertson: And I know we're getting wildly off topic here, but I think that is one of the other major growth areas for analytics, the analytics movement in soccer in particular, to dip the toe in the water into that space more. And I know some people are starting to do that now, but the impact of that data on practice, rather than just evaluating the athlete, actually informing their practice with that, I think that's a huge opportunity.
[01:05:27] Dave Tenney: Yeah, and that's just an example, and at the same time his force plate metrics should be getting better, his body comps should be changing. Again, I think it's that high performance department merging with the coaching staff to create this robust profiling model of what should the player be doing from a skills perspective, from a body comp perspective, from a speed power perspective, and how can we all come together and incrementally have them make improvements from 20 to 23. And that is a collaborative effort that the high performance director does have a large role in, I guess. That's where, you know, where it's not necessarily off topic or off tangent too far though.
[01:06:05] Sam Robertson: I was about to say you've done a good job of pulling that back in and I think that's definitely true. And that's another area which we haven't talked about a lot today, but the role of the analysts, I suppose, in all of this and how they can really be the glue, so to speak, that can speak multiple language. If again, and that's not always the case with analysts, they need to have that sport experience to be able to do that. But not even just a sport experience, but the understanding of high performance, which they don't always have if they haven't spent time growing up in the weight room, for example, or out on the pitch. So, that's another skillset I would like to see more of, but again, we're not talking about a pool of tens of thousands of people that could do that role right now I don't think. So it's something to develop over time, I'd imagine.
[01:06:50] I know you've been really generous with your time, so thank you so much for joining us, David, it was a real pleasure.
[01:06:56] Dave Tenney: No thank you. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
Final Thoughts
[01:07:05] Sam Robertson: And now some final thoughts for me on today's question. Many of the soft skills and personality traits best suited for working in sport are the same as those we'd value in any other job - stress resilience, independence, an ability to communicate and keep your ego in check.
[01:07:22] But of course, we also look for individuals who have a point of difference. The more we learn about sporting environments, and indeed aim to make them more inclusive, the more we too require diversity in our staff teams. Whether that comes in the form of experience, gender, ethnicity, or type of training, it's clear however that they also need some common language in order to be effective as a team - whether that's simply a shared theoretical view of human performance or something more nuanced.
[01:07:51] Whilst flatter structures and models of shared decision-making have become increasingly common, perhaps another important trait of modern staff teams is flexibility - an ability to respond under changing conditions and moving targets, and sometimes even perform a different role. But in order to ensure this flexibility is well placed and not compromising organisational strategy or a desired workplace structure, strong leadership and support for leadership is paramount. With this in place, questions of generalist versus specialist and soft versus hard skills all seem rather secondary.
[01:08:26] But perhaps above all else, in an industry that prides itself on increasingly detailed measurement of athletes, the same should be aspired to in evaluating high performance staff and teams. While some may find this idea, stifling, assuming the KPIs are well-developed, valid and clearly articulated, it should actually be liberating and empowering to all the individuals involved.
[01:08:49] I'm Sam Robertson, and this has been One Track Mind.
Outro
[01:08:54] Lara Chan-Baker: One Track Mind is brought to you by Track and Victoria University. Our host is professor Sam Robertson and our producer is Lara Chan-Baker - that's me!
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