By now I hope you’ve read my previous article on the necessity of adopting a high performance model in professional and college sport. If you haven’t read it yet and you’ve got 15 minutes to spare, go check it out now. If you’re in a hurry, or you just want a refresher, here’s the cliff notes version: the closest we can get to optimal performance is when we acknowledge the singular ability of the athlete to tolerate and adapt to many forms of stress. When one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, athletes can quickly exceed their limited capacity to recover and stagnate, get hurt, or generally underperform. Consequently, it is inherent on all athlete stakeholders to place performance at the heart of every decision, to collect, share and use data to make informed collaborative decisions, rather than to operate in silos. But awareness is only the first step, what next?
Like a GPS that lacks a final destination, a high performance team that doesn’t first define its desired end state is simply on a road to nowhere. Socrates remarked that wisdom lies in the definition of terms, and certainly when we define success as a high performance unit it provides the ruler against which we can measure our efforts, keep everyone accountable, and-more importantly- reverse engineer a path to take our athletes from where they are now to where we want them to be in the most efficient manner possible.
Once we have defined the desired end state of success, we need to measure it accurately and reliably. A speedometer is no good if it tells you that you’re going at 50mph when you’re actually going at 70mph, or if the number on the dial is always changing when the speed isn’t. This is a vital consideration because the more fuzzy the metric, the less accountable those responsible for it can become, and the harder it can be to infer whether your chosen plan is or isn’t working.
The next step in the process is to break apart the whole into its most basic parts. A high performance team is like any other complex system like an expensive watch, a car engine, or large construction project; it isn’t until we break things down into their smallest constituent pieces that we can figure out how they all work together, the function of each piece, where the weak link/s in the system may be, and if there are ways we can tweak or optimise them before putting the system back together, better than it was before.
This process is a consistent feature of successful organisations, and member of such organisations carry out these steps at every level, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Over the course of this article we’ll begin to explore how these principles can be applied to you, no matter what your role or what stage of your career, and what steps to take to adopt a progressively more high performance oriented approach in your work.
Defining success
The desired end state depends entirely on the level at which the question is being asked and the degree to which an individual’s decision making can affect the outcome. Much to the chagrin of sport coaches, professional and college sports teams exist at the macro level to make money (although only professional teams have the decency to admit it). Many factors in both the front office and back office can affect this outcome, and ultimately only ownership and senior management can influence the outcome at such a scale. But what if we go a level deeper and just define success for the backroom staff overseen by the General Manager? Clearly the goal is to win, and it is useful that the surest way to make money for the organisation as a whole is to not be shit at sport. If we go another level deeper still, Offensive Coordinators want to maximise points in attack, and Defensive Coordinators want to minimize points in defence. This process can and should continue down the levels until each individual in the organisation has his or her own definition of success to work towards.
Obviously this is not going to be a neat process. There is rarely one universal goal. Definitions of success may vary between individuals or sub-units within the organisation, but is important to iron out these disagreements beforehand to establish agreed upon criteria against which each member of the team is going to be evaluated. These misunderstandings are the rocks upon which many a career has been washed up. The strength coach thinks his or her goal are physical outputs, only to be fired later because “the training lacks energy”. Likewise team dieticians may produce a team full of healthy and available athletes, only to be poorly evaluated by their superior because not every member of the team looks like they are ready to step on the Olympia stage!
If you are a more junior staff member, simply ask yourself “What is a narrow definition of success for my job over which I have primary control?”. The answer to this question is the ruler against which you and those around you should measure your performance (once they agree with you). If you are a high performance manager, this is a trickier process as you will be tasked with guiding those you manage as well as yourself through this process. Equally, as the hub through which all information flows, you need to have a keen understanding of what success looks like for every athlete stakeholder.
Measuring success
The natural progression of defining the end state is measuring it. You need a valid and reliable measure to know if you hit the target or not, whether the plan is getting better or getting worse. This is a much cleaner process at the macro level of organisation (profit and loss, wins and losses) versus the micro level. For example, at the level of the strength coach, success will be determined by the sum development of a host of physical and technical qualities which are often diametrically opposed, for example anaerobic and aerobic power. Regardless, we can use research, our own experiences, data, and dialogue with other members of the team to establish agreed upon metrics.
I recommend you take the time beforehand to establish that your chosen metric is actually valid and related to performance i.e. has discriminant or predictive validity. Moreso do you have the tools to measure it in a timely and reliable fashion? If not, it is probably time to find the money in your budget to be able to. Better to spend time and money now than wonder later why things didn’t work, or provide staff members with wiggle room when you are seeking accountability and ownership. If we take away measurement, we arguably rob them of the opportunity to get better.
Breaking down success
Like any complex system, say a Rolex, a race car engine, or a construction project, the system of high performance requires us to break it down into the smallest possible constituent pieces to fully understand the interrelationship between the component parts. Only then can we identify potential weak links in the system, improve them, and then reintegrate them into the whole better than before. Again, every member of the staff should run this mental process for that which they are responsible and exert primary control over. If you’re a strength coach don’t just be concerned with speed, try to be concerned with stance phase and swing phase. Within the the stance phase, break it down further into contact time, propulsive impulse, joint angles etc. It’s only when we start to evaluate not just what an athlete did, but why they did it can we start to come up with a plan of what to do about it.
There is likely no end to this mental discipline. You can always go a level deeper. There will always be another underpinning factor. And of course the more you know, the more you know! Nonetheless, every member of the team should take the time to try to understand the intricacies of the sub system over which they are responsible for, at the most granular level that their time, knowledge and resources permit, and how this fits into the larger system of the team and organisation as a whole. In doing so, each team member is less likely to fall into the trap of myopic thinking, where he or she gets their pound of flesh, but to the detriment of the whole.
Reverse engineering success
Once each member of the team understands the moving pieces of the sub-system for which they are responsible, they need to be able to devise interventions to navigate the process of taking athletes from where they are now to where we want them to be. Ironically this is the step where the majority of practitioners jump to before knowing what it is they are working towards, how they’ll even know if it is working or not, and how all the pieces interrelate. But once these steps have been taken, we need to put our best foot forward, drawing upon a combination of research, best practice, what has worked before, the culture of the organisation etc.
There is of course no right answer as to which intervention is optimal. Each decision needs to be considered in the context of its long term sustainability, the interplay between parallel interventions, and the wider impact on other parts of the system. For example, a lower body strength session containing high volumes of eccentric intensive work may be great when considered in isolation, but a crappy option prior to a field session containing high volumes of sprint running, two days out from a game. These considerations are what makes the job of operating within a high performance team so challenging.
However there are certainly better ways and worse ways to approach a problem, and over time high performance teams should strive to develop broad standard operating procedures for how they work. Not only is this process much easier for onboarding new members to the team, and a more time efficient way to make decisions, it allows for more deliberate iteration and improvement of the system over time. This stacking of small wins long term is far more likely to lead to success than wholesale changes where the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.
Reintegrating success into the whole
In order for high performance to be fully realised, it is not sufficient for each member of the team to operate at a high level in isolation. The integrated nature of the athlete’s experience and response to stress, requires those working with the athlete to be equally integrated. Unless you operate within a team full of mind readers, that means your ability to integrate as a staff is only as good as your ability to gather, process and use data in a timely manner to make collaborative decisions. This can and should be a whole series of articles in itself, but suffice to say the faster you can act upon data, the more powerful it becomes. For example, real time GPS can alert the coach that a practice has started to significantly overshoot risk factors for soft tissue injuries before it becomes a major problem. Presenting the same coach with a GPS report a week after a player already tore their hamstring… not so much. If you are a practitioner, your goal is to streamline your data collection and processing as much as you can. If you are a manager, seek to get as much meaning as you can from the data, communicate it in a manner that elicits the behaviour change you want to see, and help facilitate communication between members of your organisation. Remember: data is only as good as your ability to act upon it.
In conclusion
If you are reading this, you are probably already intuitively going through the above steps in at least some parts of your work. But the awareness that these principles operate at every level of the organisation is the key to successfully adopting a high performance model. More importantly, possessing the ability to zoom in and out, from the micro level to the macro level and back again, is the key to unlocking the winning potential of the high performance model, whether you are the lowliest intern or your name is on the building. In future instalments of this series we’ll explore the practical steps that have to be taken to actually implement the principles we’ve discussed today.
Like a GPS that lacks a final destination, a high performance team that doesn’t first define its desired end state is simply on a road to nowhere. Socrates remarked that wisdom lies in the definition of terms, and certainly when we define success as a high performance unit it provides the ruler against which we can measure our efforts, keep everyone accountable, and-more importantly- reverse engineer a path to take our athletes from where they are now to where we want them to be in the most efficient manner possible.
Once we have defined the desired end state of success, we need to measure it accurately and reliably. A speedometer is no good if it tells you that you’re going at 50mph when you’re actually going at 70mph, or if the number on the dial is always changing when the speed isn’t. This is a vital consideration because the more fuzzy the metric, the less accountable those responsible for it can become, and the harder it can be to infer whether your chosen plan is or isn’t working.
The next step in the process is to break apart the whole into its most basic parts. A high performance team is like any other complex system like an expensive watch, a car engine, or large construction project; it isn’t until we break things down into their smallest constituent pieces that we can figure out how they all work together, the function of each piece, where the weak link/s in the system may be, and if there are ways we can tweak or optimise them before putting the system back together, better than it was before.
This process is a consistent feature of successful organisations, and member of such organisations carry out these steps at every level, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Over the course of this article we’ll begin to explore how these principles can be applied to you, no matter what your role or what stage of your career, and what steps to take to adopt a progressively more high performance oriented approach in your work.
Defining success
The desired end state depends entirely on the level at which the question is being asked and the degree to which an individual’s decision making can affect the outcome. Much to the chagrin of sport coaches, professional and college sports teams exist at the macro level to make money (although only professional teams have the decency to admit it). Many factors in both the front office and back office can affect this outcome, and ultimately only ownership and senior management can influence the outcome at such a scale. But what if we go a level deeper and just define success for the backroom staff overseen by the General Manager? Clearly the goal is to win, and it is useful that the surest way to make money for the organisation as a whole is to not be shit at sport. If we go another level deeper still, Offensive Coordinators want to maximise points in attack, and Defensive Coordinators want to minimize points in defence. This process can and should continue down the levels until each individual in the organisation has his or her own definition of success to work towards.
Obviously this is not going to be a neat process. There is rarely one universal goal. Definitions of success may vary between individuals or sub-units within the organisation, but is important to iron out these disagreements beforehand to establish agreed upon criteria against which each member of the team is going to be evaluated. These misunderstandings are the rocks upon which many a career has been washed up. The strength coach thinks his or her goal are physical outputs, only to be fired later because “the training lacks energy”. Likewise team dieticians may produce a team full of healthy and available athletes, only to be poorly evaluated by their superior because not every member of the team looks like they are ready to step on the Olympia stage!
If you are a more junior staff member, simply ask yourself “What is a narrow definition of success for my job over which I have primary control?”. The answer to this question is the ruler against which you and those around you should measure your performance (once they agree with you). If you are a high performance manager, this is a trickier process as you will be tasked with guiding those you manage as well as yourself through this process. Equally, as the hub through which all information flows, you need to have a keen understanding of what success looks like for every athlete stakeholder.
Measuring success
The natural progression of defining the end state is measuring it. You need a valid and reliable measure to know if you hit the target or not, whether the plan is getting better or getting worse. This is a much cleaner process at the macro level of organisation (profit and loss, wins and losses) versus the micro level. For example, at the level of the strength coach, success will be determined by the sum development of a host of physical and technical qualities which are often diametrically opposed, for example anaerobic and aerobic power. Regardless, we can use research, our own experiences, data, and dialogue with other members of the team to establish agreed upon metrics.
I recommend you take the time beforehand to establish that your chosen metric is actually valid and related to performance i.e. has discriminant or predictive validity. Moreso do you have the tools to measure it in a timely and reliable fashion? If not, it is probably time to find the money in your budget to be able to. Better to spend time and money now than wonder later why things didn’t work, or provide staff members with wiggle room when you are seeking accountability and ownership. If we take away measurement, we arguably rob them of the opportunity to get better.
Breaking down success
Like any complex system, say a Rolex, a race car engine, or a construction project, the system of high performance requires us to break it down into the smallest possible constituent pieces to fully understand the interrelationship between the component parts. Only then can we identify potential weak links in the system, improve them, and then reintegrate them into the whole better than before. Again, every member of the staff should run this mental process for that which they are responsible and exert primary control over. If you’re a strength coach don’t just be concerned with speed, try to be concerned with stance phase and swing phase. Within the the stance phase, break it down further into contact time, propulsive impulse, joint angles etc. It’s only when we start to evaluate not just what an athlete did, but why they did it can we start to come up with a plan of what to do about it.
There is likely no end to this mental discipline. You can always go a level deeper. There will always be another underpinning factor. And of course the more you know, the more you know! Nonetheless, every member of the team should take the time to try to understand the intricacies of the sub system over which they are responsible for, at the most granular level that their time, knowledge and resources permit, and how this fits into the larger system of the team and organisation as a whole. In doing so, each team member is less likely to fall into the trap of myopic thinking, where he or she gets their pound of flesh, but to the detriment of the whole.
Reverse engineering success
Once each member of the team understands the moving pieces of the sub-system for which they are responsible, they need to be able to devise interventions to navigate the process of taking athletes from where they are now to where we want them to be. Ironically this is the step where the majority of practitioners jump to before knowing what it is they are working towards, how they’ll even know if it is working or not, and how all the pieces interrelate. But once these steps have been taken, we need to put our best foot forward, drawing upon a combination of research, best practice, what has worked before, the culture of the organisation etc.
There is of course no right answer as to which intervention is optimal. Each decision needs to be considered in the context of its long term sustainability, the interplay between parallel interventions, and the wider impact on other parts of the system. For example, a lower body strength session containing high volumes of eccentric intensive work may be great when considered in isolation, but a crappy option prior to a field session containing high volumes of sprint running, two days out from a game. These considerations are what makes the job of operating within a high performance team so challenging.
However there are certainly better ways and worse ways to approach a problem, and over time high performance teams should strive to develop broad standard operating procedures for how they work. Not only is this process much easier for onboarding new members to the team, and a more time efficient way to make decisions, it allows for more deliberate iteration and improvement of the system over time. This stacking of small wins long term is far more likely to lead to success than wholesale changes where the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.
Reintegrating success into the whole
In order for high performance to be fully realised, it is not sufficient for each member of the team to operate at a high level in isolation. The integrated nature of the athlete’s experience and response to stress, requires those working with the athlete to be equally integrated. Unless you operate within a team full of mind readers, that means your ability to integrate as a staff is only as good as your ability to gather, process and use data in a timely manner to make collaborative decisions. This can and should be a whole series of articles in itself, but suffice to say the faster you can act upon data, the more powerful it becomes. For example, real time GPS can alert the coach that a practice has started to significantly overshoot risk factors for soft tissue injuries before it becomes a major problem. Presenting the same coach with a GPS report a week after a player already tore their hamstring… not so much. If you are a practitioner, your goal is to streamline your data collection and processing as much as you can. If you are a manager, seek to get as much meaning as you can from the data, communicate it in a manner that elicits the behaviour change you want to see, and help facilitate communication between members of your organisation. Remember: data is only as good as your ability to act upon it.
In conclusion
If you are reading this, you are probably already intuitively going through the above steps in at least some parts of your work. But the awareness that these principles operate at every level of the organisation is the key to successfully adopting a high performance model. More importantly, possessing the ability to zoom in and out, from the micro level to the macro level and back again, is the key to unlocking the winning potential of the high performance model, whether you are the lowliest intern or your name is on the building. In future instalments of this series we’ll explore the practical steps that have to be taken to actually implement the principles we’ve discussed today.
