Danny KerryOne of the big stories from the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio was Great Britain's Womens' hockey team winning the Gold medal. This success inspired a nation. Leadership Relay were fortunate to interview the then Head Coach of the squad, Danny Kerry MBE. In this interview, Danny discusses his experiences before moving into full time hockey coaching. He talks about how culture precedes performance and with great honesty and reflection about how, following feedback from a previous campaign, he changed his leadership style. In 2018, Danny took over as Head Coach of the Mens’ Hockey Programme and he tells us about some of his processes when taking over a new team. Leadership Relay would like to say a huge thank you to Danny for his time and honesty during this fascinating interview. We enjoyed this interview and got lots of take home messages from it. We hope you do too! |
The Interview
LR- Can you briefly tell me about your career before moving into hockey coaching?
DK - After being an Undergraduate at Loughborough, I taught for one year at a school in Suffolk before I went back to university as a Post Grad. I went to Warwick University and after Warwick, I went to what was, for a very short period of time, the West London Institute of Higher Education. It only stayed as the West London Institute for about a year while I was there and then it became part of Brunel University. I lectured there for six years in the Sociology of Sport.
Then I became a Senior Lecturer down at Canterbury Christchurch University, again lecturing in the Sociology of Sport. I also led a Postgraduate model in research methods. I was seven years into a PhD when the National Head Coach position came up. I gave up on it as I was never going to get it finished when I took on that job, much to my Mum and Dad's disappointment!
LR - Is your education ever something you could go back to?
DK - No, not really. I was classically one of those people finishing university and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I very nearly joined the military. I came close to going to Sandhurst, but then I was offered a place at Warwick with the Post Grad and I elected to go there instead. Then, during my academic career, the opportunities came up to coach more and more in the evenings and on weekends.
One thing led to another which led to another and I ended up working with a National League Club coaching. I was also coaching in the National Junior Pathways coaching England Under 18 men. Then I worked with the England Under 21 men after which I became involved with what was known as the England’s Women Development Squad which sat below their Senior Squad.
I then applied for a role as the full time Head Coach in late 2004. I wasn't a very good academic, I really enjoyed teaching and lecturing and I enjoyed working with personal tutees, but more and more it was becoming about research publications and that didn't float my boat. So when the opportunity came to work as a full time coach, especially in the National Programme I leapt at the opportunity.
LR - Do you think your education background helped make that step into coaching?
DK - I think in my role, I would describe it as using critical thinking skills. It’s not a phrase I hear much of these days, but particularly when I was involved with research and particularly research methods, we would discuss a lot and get into the concept of critical thinking and try to look at things in a different way.
I also think that because I was involved in essentially the social sciences, I probably had a broader grasp of that there is more than one paradigm to view the world. The Western World tends to have quite a deterministic, positivistic way of thinking about things. From the field I came from, this made me reflect using more qualitative view of the world and more of a, to use some fancy language, differing epistemological, ontological way of looking at things.
I think when I've been working with people, understanding that everybody's reality is slightly different has been pretty useful. What I do see a lot in my current world, particularly in high performance sport, is that everybody tends to look at things with a deterministic viewpoint; they try to work backwards from things. For me that is not how the world works. The illusion of certainty is a phrase I'm using a lot at the moment, there are so many variables. The world is pretty complex and we have to manage the complexity rather than this illusion of certainty.
LR - You’ve kind of touched upon it a little there but, one of your mantras is 'culture precedes performance.' What does this mean to you?
DK - Again, I guess having come from a sociological background, I’m pretty well versed in what it means from an academic viewpoint and again, just in my world at the moment, I hear a lot of people talk about culture, but I sometimes wonder what they mean by it. I talk about the prevailing norms and attitudes and behaviours. What people see, hear and feel on a day to day basis. For me, the reason culture precedes performance is because there are so many moving parts across a large high performing team. We have 27 full time athletes in the men's programme at the moment, with a part time and full time staff into the teens.
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.
LR - Getting feedback from the team is an important part of your process. I believe that you changed your approach following feedback after the Beijing Olympics. This helped to lead to Olympic successes in 2012 and 2016. How did you change and how do you continue to receive feedback from the team?
DK - As a young National Team coach, I was 34 when I was appointed which is relatively young, my view about what a high performance coach was to defeat the world on expertise and process knowledge. That was what I’d grown up in and often now when I'm working with others discussing leadership, I hear that people end up in leadership positions based on expertise and knowledge and possibly not on how well they are working with others, forming shared visions and cultures and so on. That set of skills is often the bit that has not been borne out of experience. That is exactly where I was. 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.
LR - Was that feedback in a questionnaire or was it face to face? How did they give that feedback?
DK - There were some significant surveys and follow ups by the people that conducted the surveys and then that all gets collated.
So that was Beijing. When I received that feedback, to this day, I count my lucky stars because normally when you receive that kind of feedback, you can be classically in denial and angry about it. As a result, the people delivering that feedback are probably thinking ‘oh this isn't landing. Is there any point in persevering with this person?’ It was pretty harrowing I have to say. I had invested a large amount of my emotional energy over the last 4 years and felt that these were people l’d done everything I could for and I felt really personally attacked.
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.
That has always been quite a seminal part of my life because of that more dawning self awareness; this is how I can make people feel and this is how I am as my default, particularly under pressure. This has been something that now is one of the foundations of how I try and build teams. I start with the individuals and their self awareness as part of what I see as one of the most important building blocks. That is totally and utterly borne out of my experience after Beijing.
Nowadays, we have numerous review processes with the athletes and staff.The environment is safe enough to write freely about all manner of things and from time to time, I seek 360s. I deliberately choose across a range of people who I think will provide insightful and honest feedback. So for example, recently, in my most recent 360 feedback, which was only a month or 2 ago, I’ve been challenged to think about the lens in which I view things and that perhaps I’m good at seeing risk and threat. Maybe I can balance that out by seeing more opportunity and in doing so those people, who respond well to discussions around opportunity, feel just as motivated as those people who respond well to senses of risk and threat. There is a better balance to the way I brief and debrief.
LR - How often would you do a 360 review?
DK- Probably once a year. We probably have two or three major post tournament major reviews each year and within that, in those reviews essentially, you as the leader of the programme are almost getting another 360 there.
LR - You were appointed Head Coach of the Mens’ Hockey team in 2018. When you start with a new team, what processes do you go through at the start of a new journey?
DK - I was really cognisant of two things almost on day one. One was that my appointment was going to make people feel potentially unnerved. People would have questions like ‘what does this mean for me? Where are they going? Am I still going to be in the selection mix? How does he feel about how I do my work as a practitioner? Is he going to be changing everything?’
I was very conscious of that and I really wanted to allay some of those concerns early. I spoke to people about those concerns and I made it clear that I was not coming in with a change mandate around staff, I tried to allay any staff fears. In terms of the athletes, selection is just a reality of the world we operate in. What I was very conscious of doing was talking about what we could use that had been effective from the previous coach. What we needed to keep hold of. Rather than them perceiving me as sort of throwing everything out. Now the third bit in my head was there also needs to be a sense of a step change as well. A sense of acknowledging what has been good about the past, but also a sense of where are we going next?
I think people often say that a leader's role is to help facilitate a vision. I think it is, but also early on in your tenure as a leader it is quite important that the vision is not just what, but how. Overtime, you want that to become a collective vision, but early on I think my job was to sort of set a vision about how we might go about achieving something rather than it be some vague notion that we are going to be successful. That’s all good and well, but this is how we are going to do it and try to bring that to life into something that is tangible and concrete. That is what the first few days look like; trying to get the balance right, allaying people’s fears about what this means for me, being cognisant of the past, and also helping people feel right this is a new direction and I can also get excited by it. That is the early part.
Then it’s really about trying to find the time to sit down with everybody individually. This takes an awfully long time. There are 27 athletes and 15 plus staff and you have to do that in a way so it feels safe for those people just to chew the fat with you, find out stuff about each other so that you can connect on a level a little bit beyond just your professional domain. You just start to build a bit of trust. I’ve been exceptionally fortunate that the members of the Mens’ programme have been incredibly welcoming. I think often we discuss and talk about how as a leader you may make other people feel. I think it’s also worth exploring that as a leader your own anxieties that may come about. I was anxious about how I’d be accepted into that group. They were so welcoming and so open it really helped facilitate a quicker transition into that programme bearing in mind, I'd been with the women for 15/16 years.
LR - Would those initial meetings be in a very informal environment then?
DK - Yes a range of, for some it’s just the practical reality of work and trying to fit them in and for some, I would deliberately go out of my way to go off site. We are not far from the River Thames in Bisham Abbey and there are nice villages nearby and we can go to a nice pub and say ‘right let's go to the pub for lunch.’ Thinking about the environment is quite a key factor in having good conversations. Who is or isn't around? The environment says something about the nature of the conversations so I do consider that.
LR - It's well known that you work with individuals from other sports such as Eddie Jones. Can you give any examples of things that you have changed as a result of working with other sports or other organisations?
DK - Two things really hit me. One is it's not often you see new stuff, often what you see is some elements that you also do, but you get to see them from a different vantage point. People often discuss and talk about reflection. Often your ability to reflect from a different vantage point is when you see people work in other domains, doing similar things to the way you do them and you just have a different perspective on it.
So for example, Eddie invited me in recently on a number of occasions. I had the good fortune to be in the changing room before the England Ireland game, again at half time and in the training camp before some of the recent six nations matches. You’re getting to watch a very good coach work, essentially doing all of the same things that we do and in many regards almost in the same way, but you just get this moment of opportunity to think ‘ah okay I do that, but maybe I need to think about that in a slightly different way’ that often happens.
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.
The role of the more senior people is to listen to that commentary. So they are listening for understanding and asking ‘are these less experienced members of the team keying in to the information correctly; are they making the right kind of decisions?’ Only if they hear or sense something where they think ‘hmm, I'm not so sure about that’ would the senior member pass on some wisdom. They take away the names so it depersonalises it. The squadron leader will point at one of the crew members and he will start to commentate and as he’s commentating he might point to another one and he’ll start to commentate.
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.
Now it’s some of the more senior, more experienced members that are helping to facilitate and pass on some of their experience and knowledge. So you are growing what I’d call a depth of people who can help facilitate others rather than someone classically sitting at the front of the lecture theatre talking through a video or talking through a debrief. You get far greater insight, more understanding and greater facilitation across the group. I played around with that in different formats after seeing that with the Red Arrows.
LR - That sounds very powerful.
DK - Yes, it was really fascinating to watch it live as well.
LR - Finally, what is the one book or podcast that you recommend that anyone in a leadership role read/listen to?
DK - When I saw that question, I thought I'm really going to struggle with that. I read lots and I don't like saying one book! What I would say is the one text that did pop into my mind was, after that feedback from Beijing, I was in a bit of a dark place and struggling to know where to turn. I ended up reading ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen Covey. That book had already been around for a long time before I read it. The reason I bring it up is there are a couple of principles that I still think really form a key part of the way I work.
One is ‘seek first to understand in order to be understood.’ I try to live by that under pressure situations. So you see some behaviour that strikes you as maybe breaking your values and your initial reaction might be one of anger, but I find myself sort of catching myself, which can be the difficult bit, and saying to myself ‘let me understand why they might be doing what they are doing.’ Let me have that conversation first and then we’ll be in a better place to have a wider conversation.
The opening chapter of the book is that you attend your own funeral. People are talking about you and you get like a ghost to hear what people are saying about you and it talks about starting with the end in mind; how do you want people to feel about you and the way you’ve worked with them and served them? That’s also a really powerful metaphor which stuck with me and links to that constant self awareness.
As for podcasts, I listen to all sorts of stuff. One of my favourites, although I wouldn't describe it as a leadership podcast, is ‘The Infinite Monkey Cage’ with Brian Cox. It’s a populist science podcast. What I think is so clever about it is it’s making quite complex subject areas fun to consume and I think it’s brilliant.