Best of...In Spring 2020, Leadership Relay were fortunate to interview 4 people who have had a range of experiences within elite sport. With a focus on leading in schools, I wanted to collate some of their fascinating insight and add some top tips alongside a couple of questions to consider. I remain so appreciative of the time all 4 personalities gave me and I got something from every single interview. Below are some of my own personal take home messages for leading in schools from the last 2 interviews I conducted (best of from interviews 1 and 2 to follow soon). Please let me know @leadershiprelay if you have enjoyed some of the content on this website and, if so, I'll try and be back for Series 2 over the summer! I hope you enjoy this summary. |
Best of...
Danny Cowley - Championship Football Manager with Huddersfield FC after a record breaking spell with Lincoln City
Importance of relationships (the type in bold is my interpretation of/thoughts about the comments which follow)
Whether it’s a player-coach relationship or it’s a teacher-pupil relationship, firstly you have to try to understand the person, you have to try and build a level of respect and then you try to gain their trust. Once you can do that you can then start to have an impact and start to influence them. Whether it’s skills on the pitch, whether it’s their inter-personal skills or life skills or whatever it may be.
For me, first and foremost, it’s about building relationships. I look at all of the successful managers and not just in football, but across sports, normally they are just really good human beings. You take Bobby Robson, Clive Woodward and Eddie Jones, all of these guys, they have a real sustainability as they’re good people and they’re able to, as a consequence, nurture the players and get the very best out of their talent and ability allowing them to fill their potential.
Make sure that we’re developing good learners and making subject matter fun and enjoyable
The bit that I'm interested in at the moment is just around learning and I think the best teachers do this really well. Learning is a skill and it’s a skill that nobody really teaches. We just all think that we can develop that skill through the different subjects as the vehicle almost. I actually think that trying to teach people to be good learners is something that we are working towards. That to me is about creating curiosity, and to do that you have to make something fun and enjoyable. You have to get people to love what you are trying to teach.
I watch coaching at grassroots level all the time, my daughter plays football and my little boy does gymnastics and rugby. Whenever I get a chance I watch their training and watch their coaching and sometimes we’re so keen to teach the children about techniques, tactics and the rules of the game and we should just make it fun. Once they love it and they really enjoy it then they will naturally want to learn more. They will naturally become curious. You will have them in the palm of your hand and then you can start to add to it. You’ve got to get them to love it first.
Importance of role models, resilience and hard work
I think everybody needs role models in life. That showed us how to work hard really. Hard work is definitely a key value to us. Having that resilience and determination. I just believe that everyday if you wake up, you should try to be the best you can be and you never give up. I say it to my children all of the time. If you can have those 2 qualities, wake up in the morning, be the best you can be and never give up then you’re not going to go far wrong.
Those values are important to us as is humility. I really like people that are successful. People that achieve success and then want to have further success. People who are always willing to learn and always willing to try to improve and never get ahead of themselves. Those values are the foundation of everything for us. The stronger the foundation, the stronger your organisation is going to be.
Have a picture or an image in our head about what success will look like. This is a very powerful motivator.
We felt that really early on in our tenure and I’ve told this story before about Nicky and I being in a board meeting. It would have been around May half-term and we’d just been at the club for a couple of weeks. There was a Lincoln City Soccer School going on on the astro-turf which just backed onto the stadium. There were maybe 40-50 kids at this Soccer School and only one of them had a Lincoln City kit on. There were Man United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Barcelona kits, but only one Lincoln kit and that definitely hit home with us.
I can remember saying to Nicky ‘we’ve got to make it cool to support Lincoln.’ I can remember we went out onto the pitch and we spoke to the little boy who had the Lincoln kit on and it was almost like he was a little bit embarrassed. He was kind of talking out of the corner of his mouth and at that time the club had been relegated to the National League and had been in there for 5 years and not finished above 13th in the division. We wanted to make it cool to support Lincoln and that was our ambition.
It’s all about getting the basics right.
What are the basics in our schools? Do we all have a consistent and clear picture of how to achieve success? E.g what are the basics for successful learning and teaching in the classroom?
So if you think about football, ultimately there are 5 cycles; in possession, out of possession, the defence to attack transition that we call the counter attack, the attack to defence transition that we call the counter press and then you have your restarts and set pieces. You think about the 5 cycles and you kind of break the game down into the different phases. So in possession it might be the build phase or the create phase and we call it the finish phase and we try to break the pitch into 3 parts.
Danny Kerry - 2016 Gold Medal Winning Hockey Coach with Great Britain’s Women’s Team
Culture precedes performance.
So what we are looking to do is operate at our best as often and as frequently as we can and that can be quite a challenging place at times. Rather than just create a large inordinate number of policies and procedures, we try to create an environment where people understand the expectations, the norms, the values and the behaviours.
We build that together and that is the glue that keeps people acting with each other in the right way in order to get to where we want to get to. That’s why I say that culture precedes performance. If you get that right, you’ve got a mutually supportive and challenging set of relationships that go on in order to keep people in the right place, in order to benefit the team as a whole.
Receiving feedback from our teams and acting upon it.
With the group of athletes I took to Beijing, I felt I'd worked incredibly hard, and I had, I felt I'd given everything. The reality was I'd not made a great environment for those athletes. Bearing in mind, for young people, going to the Olympic Games is probably one of the most important experiences of their lifetime at that point in their lives.
Superficially, the results were pretty good. We were ranked 11th and we finished 6th, which secured funding for our Home Olympics 4 years hence. The actual experience for them was not good. If I had to bring that to life, I was fixated on discussing performance, reviewing, debriefing, preparing and not really interested in how people were feeling and how I helped to facilitate the environment within the group.It was just about expertise, tactics and technical work. As a result of that, it became a pretty tough place for some people to be. After the Olympic Games and after every Major Tournament there is the opportunity for very very detailed feedback from everybody, every member of staff and every athlete.
To sum it up, they pretty much said, ‘ok, he knows about hockey, but we don't really trust this person, we don't like being led by him and we don't really like him’ And that is me being very polite.
On the day I received the feedback, I had a bit like what you would call an epiphany ‘yes, I can see why they’ve written what they’ve written, I can understand it.’ That came out in that debrief process, and I think the people who were providing that feedback for me, which was the Performance Director and the Chairman of the Board, thought well maybe there is a possibility for some growth here, some reflections and some learning. So I was given the opportunity to keep going and improve the way I was doing things.
Be prepared to think outside the box and look at procedures in other sectors.
The following is an innovative way of improving performance which could potentially work in schools - maybe teachers film could themselves or it could be filming parts of student or NQT lessons:-
Then of course you do get those moments where you see practice where you think I hadn't had the imagination to think about it that way. I spent a day, about a year or so ago, up with the Red Arrows in Scampton, Lincolnshire. There were a small number of us and we were very interested in particular in their debriefing process. They fly and then they debrief. What they do is three things that really hit home to me. They never use names, they refer to themselves as Red 1 to Red 11. They refer to each other by their numbers. They sit in formation in the debrief room and then what happens is as the video is playing, the senior members of the team keep quiet and the more junior members, the higher numbers, are expected to essentially commentate on what they did and why they did it.
What you get is that nice facilitation of expertise from the older, more experienced members, who will provide some interesting information. I’ve thought about what that can mean for debriefs in my environment where getting people to commentate gives you insight into what people are thinking and feeling. Often the debrief is led by the most experienced people i.e the coach. If you start with what the athlete is seeing and feeling and why they made the decisions they did, it means you have more insight and then rather than it always be the coach or leader.
Importance of relationships (the type in bold is my interpretation of/thoughts about the comments which follow)
Whether it’s a player-coach relationship or it’s a teacher-pupil relationship, firstly you have to try to understand the person, you have to try and build a level of respect and then you try to gain their trust. Once you can do that you can then start to have an impact and start to influence them. Whether it’s skills on the pitch, whether it’s their inter-personal skills or life skills or whatever it may be.
For me, first and foremost, it’s about building relationships. I look at all of the successful managers and not just in football, but across sports, normally they are just really good human beings. You take Bobby Robson, Clive Woodward and Eddie Jones, all of these guys, they have a real sustainability as they’re good people and they’re able to, as a consequence, nurture the players and get the very best out of their talent and ability allowing them to fill their potential.
Make sure that we’re developing good learners and making subject matter fun and enjoyable
The bit that I'm interested in at the moment is just around learning and I think the best teachers do this really well. Learning is a skill and it’s a skill that nobody really teaches. We just all think that we can develop that skill through the different subjects as the vehicle almost. I actually think that trying to teach people to be good learners is something that we are working towards. That to me is about creating curiosity, and to do that you have to make something fun and enjoyable. You have to get people to love what you are trying to teach.
I watch coaching at grassroots level all the time, my daughter plays football and my little boy does gymnastics and rugby. Whenever I get a chance I watch their training and watch their coaching and sometimes we’re so keen to teach the children about techniques, tactics and the rules of the game and we should just make it fun. Once they love it and they really enjoy it then they will naturally want to learn more. They will naturally become curious. You will have them in the palm of your hand and then you can start to add to it. You’ve got to get them to love it first.
Importance of role models, resilience and hard work
I think everybody needs role models in life. That showed us how to work hard really. Hard work is definitely a key value to us. Having that resilience and determination. I just believe that everyday if you wake up, you should try to be the best you can be and you never give up. I say it to my children all of the time. If you can have those 2 qualities, wake up in the morning, be the best you can be and never give up then you’re not going to go far wrong.
Those values are important to us as is humility. I really like people that are successful. People that achieve success and then want to have further success. People who are always willing to learn and always willing to try to improve and never get ahead of themselves. Those values are the foundation of everything for us. The stronger the foundation, the stronger your organisation is going to be.
Have a picture or an image in our head about what success will look like. This is a very powerful motivator.
We felt that really early on in our tenure and I’ve told this story before about Nicky and I being in a board meeting. It would have been around May half-term and we’d just been at the club for a couple of weeks. There was a Lincoln City Soccer School going on on the astro-turf which just backed onto the stadium. There were maybe 40-50 kids at this Soccer School and only one of them had a Lincoln City kit on. There were Man United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Barcelona kits, but only one Lincoln kit and that definitely hit home with us.
I can remember saying to Nicky ‘we’ve got to make it cool to support Lincoln.’ I can remember we went out onto the pitch and we spoke to the little boy who had the Lincoln kit on and it was almost like he was a little bit embarrassed. He was kind of talking out of the corner of his mouth and at that time the club had been relegated to the National League and had been in there for 5 years and not finished above 13th in the division. We wanted to make it cool to support Lincoln and that was our ambition.
It’s all about getting the basics right.
What are the basics in our schools? Do we all have a consistent and clear picture of how to achieve success? E.g what are the basics for successful learning and teaching in the classroom?
So if you think about football, ultimately there are 5 cycles; in possession, out of possession, the defence to attack transition that we call the counter attack, the attack to defence transition that we call the counter press and then you have your restarts and set pieces. You think about the 5 cycles and you kind of break the game down into the different phases. So in possession it might be the build phase or the create phase and we call it the finish phase and we try to break the pitch into 3 parts.
Danny Kerry - 2016 Gold Medal Winning Hockey Coach with Great Britain’s Women’s Team
Culture precedes performance.
So what we are looking to do is operate at our best as often and as frequently as we can and that can be quite a challenging place at times. Rather than just create a large inordinate number of policies and procedures, we try to create an environment where people understand the expectations, the norms, the values and the behaviours.
We build that together and that is the glue that keeps people acting with each other in the right way in order to get to where we want to get to. That’s why I say that culture precedes performance. If you get that right, you’ve got a mutually supportive and challenging set of relationships that go on in order to keep people in the right place, in order to benefit the team as a whole.
Receiving feedback from our teams and acting upon it.
With the group of athletes I took to Beijing, I felt I'd worked incredibly hard, and I had, I felt I'd given everything. The reality was I'd not made a great environment for those athletes. Bearing in mind, for young people, going to the Olympic Games is probably one of the most important experiences of their lifetime at that point in their lives.
Superficially, the results were pretty good. We were ranked 11th and we finished 6th, which secured funding for our Home Olympics 4 years hence. The actual experience for them was not good. If I had to bring that to life, I was fixated on discussing performance, reviewing, debriefing, preparing and not really interested in how people were feeling and how I helped to facilitate the environment within the group.It was just about expertise, tactics and technical work. As a result of that, it became a pretty tough place for some people to be. After the Olympic Games and after every Major Tournament there is the opportunity for very very detailed feedback from everybody, every member of staff and every athlete.
To sum it up, they pretty much said, ‘ok, he knows about hockey, but we don't really trust this person, we don't like being led by him and we don't really like him’ And that is me being very polite.
On the day I received the feedback, I had a bit like what you would call an epiphany ‘yes, I can see why they’ve written what they’ve written, I can understand it.’ That came out in that debrief process, and I think the people who were providing that feedback for me, which was the Performance Director and the Chairman of the Board, thought well maybe there is a possibility for some growth here, some reflections and some learning. So I was given the opportunity to keep going and improve the way I was doing things.
Be prepared to think outside the box and look at procedures in other sectors.
The following is an innovative way of improving performance which could potentially work in schools - maybe teachers film could themselves or it could be filming parts of student or NQT lessons:-
Then of course you do get those moments where you see practice where you think I hadn't had the imagination to think about it that way. I spent a day, about a year or so ago, up with the Red Arrows in Scampton, Lincolnshire. There were a small number of us and we were very interested in particular in their debriefing process. They fly and then they debrief. What they do is three things that really hit home to me. They never use names, they refer to themselves as Red 1 to Red 11. They refer to each other by their numbers. They sit in formation in the debrief room and then what happens is as the video is playing, the senior members of the team keep quiet and the more junior members, the higher numbers, are expected to essentially commentate on what they did and why they did it.
What you get is that nice facilitation of expertise from the older, more experienced members, who will provide some interesting information. I’ve thought about what that can mean for debriefs in my environment where getting people to commentate gives you insight into what people are thinking and feeling. Often the debrief is led by the most experienced people i.e the coach. If you start with what the athlete is seeing and feeling and why they made the decisions they did, it means you have more insight and then rather than it always be the coach or leader.