Chris SpiceWe are very pleased to publish our 7th interview. It’s with the National Performance Director of British Swimming, Chris Spice. Chris had a successful hockey career as a player and Olympic Gold Medal Winning coach in Australia, before becoming a successful Performance Director in hockey, rugby union, basketball and now swimming. Chris demonstrates the fantastic ability to build upon his experiences in each sport. He is able to transfer his leadership skills and apply them in a new context. These experiences culminated in Chris leading Great British swimming to its best Olympic Performance in over 100 years in 2016, as well leading GB to its best ever World Championship Performance in 2015. In this excellent interview, Chris gives some examples of what he does on a day to day basis and discusses the general leadership skills that he has applied to each of his roles. He talks about what he looks for when he takes on a new project and the importance of relationships, structure and people. Chris also shares some fascinating insight into some of the analysis he completed in his very early days as Performance Director at British Swimming. This helped inform a new mantra which paved the way for the great success that followed. Leadership Relay would like to thank Chris for his time. We appreciate that this is a very busy time for him in what is a very uncertain time for sport around the world. Thank you so much, Chris. We hope you enjoy the interview as much as us. |
The Interview
LR - What was your career pathway to becoming a Performance Director initially?
CS- I was originally a hockey player in Australia and played for my state and won about six National Championships and played a handful of games for the country. I got interested in coaching towards the end of my playing career. I coached a men’s state league team in Western Australia quite successfully. I then coached the Australian national women with Richard Charlesworth in the lead up to, and during, the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. We won the Gold in Atlanta which was nice.
It was really after that when the hockey Performance Director (PD) job came up in England. I thought ‘that sounds interesting.’ Richard was keen to stay on for another four years and I was keen to move on if he wasn’t moving on. So in the end I came over, did the interview and took the job with England Hockey. It then became the PD for the British Hockey teams into the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
I saw a lot of investment coming into the UK and I thought that it was a good opportunity to get involved in something from the beginning. Lottery funding had just started. I think I was the first overseas Performance Director appointed in 1997, so I’ve been here from the beginning really!
It has been a fantastic journey and if you’d asked me at the beginning of my career if I’d end up as a Performance Director, I wouldn’t have even been thinking of it. I was referred to the other day as a ‘Serial Performance Director.’ I’m not quite sure what that means, but I love the role. It's a great job and it has been great being involved in elite sport in so many different sports now.
LR - Do you find it’s much there are different attitudes in Australia compared to over here in the UK?
CS - If I go back to the time when I started everyone was thinking ‘overseas is better and we need to get people from overseas.’ A lot of our mentality at that time was that we don’t have the expertise here, so we need to drag it in and that was probably right at that time. Now the great strength of the system is that we’re growing our own. Key British people are now getting exported elsewhere which is always great, as much as it’s frustrating sometimes for us as you lose good people but it is a sign that the system is working.
There has been such a shift in the last 20 years and now people are wanting our expertise. This is a phenomenal thing as the system we now have has been built in what is a relatively short space of time, and during that time we’ve been able to become such a powerhouse in Olympic and Paralympic sport.
LR - What does your role involve on a day to day basis?
CS - That’s a good one! The thing about the role is that it is diverse, once you’re overseeing the whole programme the key parts of the programme need constant attention. That can be anything, at the minute it’s planning for next year because we’ve got so much uncertainty. Planning is a huge part of the job. We’ll have anything up to 25 to 30 competitions and camps any one year from top to bottom. So we need to understand where athletes need to be, where they need to train, where they need to go to, whether it’s altitude, whether it’s the south of France for competition - whatever it is. All of that planning is a major part of the job and I've got a great planning team.
Planning is a major part, but then of course you do anything from identifying young talented athletes, selecting teams, selecting athletes to the World Class programme. I have a selection group that looks at selection and I chair that panel. We write policies that select the teams based on objective and subjective data. We also work closely with our Home Nation partners because they are really important to us. This is because in British Swimming we only look after the very top end of the performance pathway and all the younger talent is identified and developed by the Home Nations. So we have a Performance Implementation Group that has the leads of the Home Nations and ourselves in it and that often takes up a lot of time to make sure the pathways are aligned.
In the first year of my job, we commissioned a Domestic Competition Review. It changed the way the regions and the calendars operated because it needed to bring the pathway together supporting, in the end, the international programme. I also get involved in the International Influence - whether we are going to cancel meets at the moment, how can we influence and persuade the International Federation to agree with our point of view versus that of other countries.
One of the big things that I’ve been doing this week is renegotiating contracts for the hosts of our National Centres - all of those contracts are up for negotiation right now so we’re trying to agree what the next four years will look like. The other major part of the job is probably building relationships with our athletes so they are well informed. We set up an Athlete Representative Group within the squad and they have a direct line into me which I think is really important. We are constantly in dialogue with them, particularly around how they’re feeling, around mental health, around what is happening on the ground with all the uncertainty at the moment. So that whole Athlete Representative Group has become an important piece of how we work. That is just an example of some of it, it’s incredibly varied which makes it incredibly enjoyable.
LR - You have been a performance director in a number of sports. Are there any general leadership skills that you have transferred across and used in each of your roles?
CS - Thinking back, I can remember when I first moved out of my own sport, from hockey to rugby. Clearly the job was going to be slightly different because I wasn't an expert in rugby, but I had to learn about it very fast. I think one of the things is to be patient. I try to initially look carefully and stay curious about what is happening in the present. I keep an eye on what is happening looking forward and remember that we need to keep changing if we are going to maximise the performance opportunities. Making sure that I’ve got one eye on the present, and one eye on the future - that’s the job of the PD. Whereas, my head coach needs to have both eyes on the present as he or she should have. That job is all about getting a performance out of the senior team, at that given moment.
With that in mind, I think the next key thing is culture. Culture is king in my mind and it always has been, even back when I was a coach in the 90's in Australia. The culture of the team is so important, the culture of my staff, organisation is absolutely vital in how we are going to drive performance forward. Setting those team behaviours and constantly asking - what does it mean for our staff? What is the impact on our athletes? Sharing our vision and bringing people with you on the journey is critically important.
In my experience, you have to look beyond just what people are telling you. Often you hear a lot of things, but in reality you might see something different. My background in education was coaching and behavioural psychology so I come to the PD role from that perspective. I'm always looking to see if the words I hear match the actions I see. I'm very careful about that in the early stages and looking at whether what people are telling you is actually happening on the ground - observation is a key part of the role.
The third thing is that ability to bring people with you. In these roles the relationships are so important. So for me, if you’re going to mobilize what is a staff of 80 and an athlete base of a couple of hundred they have to get to know you, you have to get to know them, and investing your time into those relationships is really key.
In the end we are trying to build a strong, resilient organisation that can adapt quickly. That is the big thing about performance sport, you have to be nimble and flexible, but at the same time never lose sight of doing the basics well. This is because in the end, the basics will be the key things that deliver the outcomes. It’s about balance between innovation and performance and we’re constantly walking that tightrope. Sometimes it’s an uncomfortable place to be, and we know that, and sometimes we even have to create that uncomfortable place as that is where the best learning takes place, and people build their confidence.
‘Comfort’ can be your enemy in elite sport as it leads to complacency. Whether it’s for staff, whether it’s for athletes or whoever, but if you are not creating that level of uncomfortableness then we’re not really pushing the boundaries and building resilience in our athletes and staff. Our job is to prepare them for all the difficult situations they will face so that when they are competing it almost becomes easy or second nature. That is always something that I’m trying to develop in my programmes, but doing it in the right way of course.
LR - Do you think it helps not having a background in that particular sport because you don’t have any preconceived misconceptions about it?
CS - Possibly yes, as I come to these roles without any baggage. I think back to when I took the hockey job, there was lots of talk ‘oh he’s going to want to do this, he’s going to want to do that’ because I was well known in hockey. I remember the first conversation I had with Clive (Woodward) in rugby. I was sitting in an England Rugby team meeting and they were talking about attacking the space, playing with width, counter attacking and valuing possession.
Now I could have been sitting in a hockey meeting because they’re both ‘invasion’ games - you’re invading the opposition’s space and the principles around that are the same. It was an eye opener for me because again you go into another world and you think ‘wow, this is going to be totally different’ but fundamentally a lot of the things are the same. That was a real eye opener that first time. Now, what I'm trying to do in swimming is bring some of the team sport philosophies into the individual sport environment. This is the next challenge for me after working in three team sports.
In my own mind, I thought ‘what does team mean to them?’ because it’s quite a different thing to what a team means to a sport where you are absolutely relying on each other for the team to win. So it’s been an interesting challenge around getting them to understand what ‘team’ means in their context because it can't be my context, it has to be about what works for them. We’ve really built the team ethos in swimming far beyond what they’ve ever had before and that is clearly reflected in our results, which has been nice to see.
LR - You’ve kind of touched upon this already, but when you first start in a new role with a new sport, what are your first priorities?
CS - Before I take on a sport, I do a ‘deep dive’ to have a look whether I think it’s the right sport for me - can I make a difference? Will this sport shift? Is the sport ready for the shift that’s needed? Normally when I move or get approached for a job there is something that needs to change. I can remember being called a ‘Change Management Specialist’ and I kind of thought ‘what does that mean?’ but when I look back at my four sports I think they’re probably right about that.
So generally, when I look at a job I ask ‘what can I bring? What difference can I make? Is the sport ready for that?’ Sometimes in professional sport particularly, I know they’re not ready for the level of change that someone like me would want to bring in. You have to be able to think that in the end, you’re going to be able to get the job done.
So I take a look at the structure and I take a look at the people. It’s interesting thinking about these two areas in themselves because you think you might have the perfect structure, but if you don't have the right people to fill the roles, then the structure can fall down and vice versa. For me, I always look at those things together. In my mind, I might have a framework about what I think the structure should look like as we move forward, but then you’re trying to find and attract the right people. If you don’t have the right people at the right level then you need to adjust the structure and certainly through my career, I’ve done that. So I look at those two things in tandem - structure and people, and constantly evaluate both.
I usually give myself six months to engrain myself in the sport. So I speak to as many people as possible. I do that ‘deep dive’ that I talked about before and I do it ‘on the ground.’ After six months, I normally sit back and take some time for myself. I normally lock myself away for a few days and come out with what I think is the most appropriate way forward. Then you’ve got to get buy in, and that gets back to the people bit - you have to be able to bring your vision to life and then bring people with you; create something special and exciting to be part of.
Fortunately, I’ve been lucky, particularly in the swimming job, that we’ve had success pretty quickly. There is nothing that brings people with you more than having a bit of success. We had an equal best Commonwealth Games and Europeans Championships after one year, our best ever World Championships in 2015 and our best ever Olympics in 2016. So then I guess people think that you know what you’re talking about even though they might disagree with parts of the programme.
LR - Do you often work with other organisations or sports to share ideas? Can you give any examples of anything that you have implemented as a result?
CS - It’s massive. Going back to the system in the UK, one of the great strengths of the system is there are now around forty Performance Directors. When I started there were only four. We have a Performance Directors Forum where we share a lot of information around sports science, statistical analysis, coach development, team selection, team behaviours and how we set culture, etc etc. All of that stuff gets tossed around at various levels at the PD forum and I’m fortunate or unfortunate enough to have been elected Chair a few years back which has given me a great insight to other top programmes and how they operate.
I think this is one of the main reasons we’ve been able to sustain our success in Britain. For me, the level of sharing that goes on in this country is far beyond any other country in the world, I’m absolutely convinced of that. This was never more evident than just recently when we’ve been trying to come out of lockdown. We built key relationships across sport and I sat on the working group that took proposals forward to Government on behalf of elite sport. It was about how we can get the elite athletes back into training quickly and safely. We gathered a lot of information across the sports and it was phenomenal what we achieved in quite a short space of time. We were able to convince the government that we were able to manage it well, and then we had to prove we could manage it well. All those sorts of things say to me that the systems are really working. That is a real plus of the UK sport system and it’s such a privilege to be part of it - we have some outstanding people in performance sport in this country.
LR - How do staff know what the expectations are within the Elite British Swimming environment?
CS - We do quite a bit of work with our staff at different levels. I have a head of people development who principally works with the coaches and some of our other performance staff. Nigel (Redman) drives a lot of the culture pieces alongside me. We get together a few times a year with our staff and then with the wider staff and associates annually which can be over a hundred people across the Home Nations. This ensures that everyone is clear about what our goals are, what is immediately ahead of us, and gives them a flavour of the future so they can feel part of the journey and buy into what we are doing.
If I go back to the reason I took the job in swimming, when I did that ‘deep dive’ I discovered that in the London Olympics only 20% of the athletes swam their season’s best in the Olympics itself - so 80% of the team swam slower in the Olympics than they did all year. I thought ‘hmm that can’t be right, surely we can be better than that?’ When I did some analysis around it, I looked at the top teams and they were around 60%. So it’s a hard thing to do to swim fast earlier in the year and then swim fast again when the big dance comes with all of the pressure that comes with that.
We set about having this mantra ‘swim a season’s best at your benchmark meet’. So whether you’re a 15 year old or whether you’re 18 or you’re 30, the whole plan is to swim fast in the spring, and swim faster in the summer. So now the athletes coming through the system are already understand that.
In the old days athletes were rewarded for swimming fast in a meets that didn’t matter. They were rewarded for setting a fast time and being ranked 3rd in the World, but in the end when they came 15th at the World Championship, in my mind they’re 15th they’re not 3rd. At the time, in the sport’s mind they were 3rd. So we had to change the narrative around that from top to bottom. Everyone now is joined up with this idea that the time to swim fast is when it matters most.
In the end we’re not going to match the medal count of other nations because we don’t have the wide range of talent, but what we can do is maximize the talent that we’ve got. That is a crucial bit of what we do. By focussing on that goal, which is much more a process thing and something that everyone is capable of doing, then we’re more likely to achieve it.
We usually don’t talk to the athletes about medals, we don’t talk about a medal target, we don’t talk about anything to do with an outcome that can get in the way of us staying focussed on the process. The process for us is swimming the perfect race - who swims the perfect race right? So absolutely analysing every single bit of detail and working on it is the key to improvement.
If you look at someone like Adam Peaty, the fact that he not only breaks the World records, but he breaks them in major competitions, and not many people do that across the world in any sport. Many people break World records when it’s not a major championship, but he has got this incredible ability to rise and lift himself on the big stage. He is our talisman, he’s our guy that is now setting the standard for everyone else. He is an incredible athlete and most important he is an incredible person; humble and grounded in what is important.
If I think back to 2015, we’d come off a very poor World Championships in 2013, I’d just started in the job and we won just one bronze medal. Everyone was saying ‘British swimming is in a right state’ as we were also poor in London in 2012. We did manage to win the Europeans in 2014 for the first time in a while, and then the next World Championships were in 2015. I met with my boss halfway through the competition in Kazan and he said to me ‘do you realize if we win one more medal, it’s the best performance ever?’ and I replied ‘actually I don’t realise that and to be honest I wasn't even thinking about it. We’ve got a group of finals tonight and we’ve got 3 or 4 medal chances and all of tonight’s swimmers have got my attention. I’m happy to talk about it at the end of the meet, but I’m kind of not interested right now.’
That's kind of how the whole programme has evolved. We don’t talk about our performance until it’s over. We want to do our debrief well and we absolutely want to pull apart every single thing that we’ve done, and we want to learn about it and we want to get better. During the competition, and it’s the same with the athletes, we don't want to be thinking about a time or something that is not focussed on getting you the desired result. That is a massive shift that we’ve done in the sport - where you place your attention under pressure.
Our mantra at the minute is, if we get our season’s best percentage up into the numbers we want, the medals come to us - we don’t chase anything. They come to us because of our performances. Of course, you can’t equate for the phenomenal new athlete that has come out of another country and grabs a whole heap of medals - we can’t plan for that, but we can take care of our own performances. That has been a massive shift in the psychology of where we have taken the programme. It has sustained us through the last few Worlds and hopefully Tokyo next year - fingers crossed.
LR - Are there any leadership books/podcasts that you recommend all leaders listen to?
CS - I’m very fortunate that I have a personal coach that finds things for me. I know Ric Charlesworth and I thought his book ‘World’s Best’ was pretty impressive. He kept coaching and moved from the Australian women’s hockey team to the Australian men after I left. They were bronze medallists in London 2012 and they went on to win the World Cup in 2014. I was fortunate enough to go to Holland it and watch the final where I thought that was the best hockey I’ve ever seen played ever, by any team, then or since. They played the Netherlands, who were an excellent team and beat them 6-1 in the final. So ‘World’s Best’ is an impressive read.
Different things tend to come to me. One of the topics that we’re exploring at the minute is the idea of ‘toxic positivity.’ This is where coaches constantly give their athletes positive feedback, positive feedback, positive feedback and the problem with that is when people constantly hear all of these positive messages they lose sight of reality. Then it comes back to haunt them later on. You hear a lot of people from a mental health point of view talking about staying positive and being positive which is great, but if you over-do it there could possibly be some issues. There is some really interesting research going on around the whole issue of ‘toxic positivity’ I don’t particularly like the wording, but that’s what they’re calling it! There is stuff like that that interests me. I do like reading the short, punchy articles on areas of interest so that I can bring them up with my team and explore possibilities in our programme.
We hope you enjoyed this interview. If you enjoyed it please do let us know on our twitter account!
You can view interview number 7 with football manager and Primary Headteacher, Jamie Vermiglio here -https://leadershiprelay.weebly.com/jamie-vermiglio.html
If you enjoy hockey, you can view interview number 3 with the coach of Great Britain's Womens' Olympic Gold Medal winning coach, Danny Kerry here - https://leadershiprelay.weebly.com/danny-kerry.html
CS- I was originally a hockey player in Australia and played for my state and won about six National Championships and played a handful of games for the country. I got interested in coaching towards the end of my playing career. I coached a men’s state league team in Western Australia quite successfully. I then coached the Australian national women with Richard Charlesworth in the lead up to, and during, the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. We won the Gold in Atlanta which was nice.
It was really after that when the hockey Performance Director (PD) job came up in England. I thought ‘that sounds interesting.’ Richard was keen to stay on for another four years and I was keen to move on if he wasn’t moving on. So in the end I came over, did the interview and took the job with England Hockey. It then became the PD for the British Hockey teams into the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
I saw a lot of investment coming into the UK and I thought that it was a good opportunity to get involved in something from the beginning. Lottery funding had just started. I think I was the first overseas Performance Director appointed in 1997, so I’ve been here from the beginning really!
It has been a fantastic journey and if you’d asked me at the beginning of my career if I’d end up as a Performance Director, I wouldn’t have even been thinking of it. I was referred to the other day as a ‘Serial Performance Director.’ I’m not quite sure what that means, but I love the role. It's a great job and it has been great being involved in elite sport in so many different sports now.
LR - Do you find it’s much there are different attitudes in Australia compared to over here in the UK?
CS - If I go back to the time when I started everyone was thinking ‘overseas is better and we need to get people from overseas.’ A lot of our mentality at that time was that we don’t have the expertise here, so we need to drag it in and that was probably right at that time. Now the great strength of the system is that we’re growing our own. Key British people are now getting exported elsewhere which is always great, as much as it’s frustrating sometimes for us as you lose good people but it is a sign that the system is working.
There has been such a shift in the last 20 years and now people are wanting our expertise. This is a phenomenal thing as the system we now have has been built in what is a relatively short space of time, and during that time we’ve been able to become such a powerhouse in Olympic and Paralympic sport.
LR - What does your role involve on a day to day basis?
CS - That’s a good one! The thing about the role is that it is diverse, once you’re overseeing the whole programme the key parts of the programme need constant attention. That can be anything, at the minute it’s planning for next year because we’ve got so much uncertainty. Planning is a huge part of the job. We’ll have anything up to 25 to 30 competitions and camps any one year from top to bottom. So we need to understand where athletes need to be, where they need to train, where they need to go to, whether it’s altitude, whether it’s the south of France for competition - whatever it is. All of that planning is a major part of the job and I've got a great planning team.
Planning is a major part, but then of course you do anything from identifying young talented athletes, selecting teams, selecting athletes to the World Class programme. I have a selection group that looks at selection and I chair that panel. We write policies that select the teams based on objective and subjective data. We also work closely with our Home Nation partners because they are really important to us. This is because in British Swimming we only look after the very top end of the performance pathway and all the younger talent is identified and developed by the Home Nations. So we have a Performance Implementation Group that has the leads of the Home Nations and ourselves in it and that often takes up a lot of time to make sure the pathways are aligned.
In the first year of my job, we commissioned a Domestic Competition Review. It changed the way the regions and the calendars operated because it needed to bring the pathway together supporting, in the end, the international programme. I also get involved in the International Influence - whether we are going to cancel meets at the moment, how can we influence and persuade the International Federation to agree with our point of view versus that of other countries.
One of the big things that I’ve been doing this week is renegotiating contracts for the hosts of our National Centres - all of those contracts are up for negotiation right now so we’re trying to agree what the next four years will look like. The other major part of the job is probably building relationships with our athletes so they are well informed. We set up an Athlete Representative Group within the squad and they have a direct line into me which I think is really important. We are constantly in dialogue with them, particularly around how they’re feeling, around mental health, around what is happening on the ground with all the uncertainty at the moment. So that whole Athlete Representative Group has become an important piece of how we work. That is just an example of some of it, it’s incredibly varied which makes it incredibly enjoyable.
LR - You have been a performance director in a number of sports. Are there any general leadership skills that you have transferred across and used in each of your roles?
CS - Thinking back, I can remember when I first moved out of my own sport, from hockey to rugby. Clearly the job was going to be slightly different because I wasn't an expert in rugby, but I had to learn about it very fast. I think one of the things is to be patient. I try to initially look carefully and stay curious about what is happening in the present. I keep an eye on what is happening looking forward and remember that we need to keep changing if we are going to maximise the performance opportunities. Making sure that I’ve got one eye on the present, and one eye on the future - that’s the job of the PD. Whereas, my head coach needs to have both eyes on the present as he or she should have. That job is all about getting a performance out of the senior team, at that given moment.
With that in mind, I think the next key thing is culture. Culture is king in my mind and it always has been, even back when I was a coach in the 90's in Australia. The culture of the team is so important, the culture of my staff, organisation is absolutely vital in how we are going to drive performance forward. Setting those team behaviours and constantly asking - what does it mean for our staff? What is the impact on our athletes? Sharing our vision and bringing people with you on the journey is critically important.
In my experience, you have to look beyond just what people are telling you. Often you hear a lot of things, but in reality you might see something different. My background in education was coaching and behavioural psychology so I come to the PD role from that perspective. I'm always looking to see if the words I hear match the actions I see. I'm very careful about that in the early stages and looking at whether what people are telling you is actually happening on the ground - observation is a key part of the role.
The third thing is that ability to bring people with you. In these roles the relationships are so important. So for me, if you’re going to mobilize what is a staff of 80 and an athlete base of a couple of hundred they have to get to know you, you have to get to know them, and investing your time into those relationships is really key.
In the end we are trying to build a strong, resilient organisation that can adapt quickly. That is the big thing about performance sport, you have to be nimble and flexible, but at the same time never lose sight of doing the basics well. This is because in the end, the basics will be the key things that deliver the outcomes. It’s about balance between innovation and performance and we’re constantly walking that tightrope. Sometimes it’s an uncomfortable place to be, and we know that, and sometimes we even have to create that uncomfortable place as that is where the best learning takes place, and people build their confidence.
‘Comfort’ can be your enemy in elite sport as it leads to complacency. Whether it’s for staff, whether it’s for athletes or whoever, but if you are not creating that level of uncomfortableness then we’re not really pushing the boundaries and building resilience in our athletes and staff. Our job is to prepare them for all the difficult situations they will face so that when they are competing it almost becomes easy or second nature. That is always something that I’m trying to develop in my programmes, but doing it in the right way of course.
LR - Do you think it helps not having a background in that particular sport because you don’t have any preconceived misconceptions about it?
CS - Possibly yes, as I come to these roles without any baggage. I think back to when I took the hockey job, there was lots of talk ‘oh he’s going to want to do this, he’s going to want to do that’ because I was well known in hockey. I remember the first conversation I had with Clive (Woodward) in rugby. I was sitting in an England Rugby team meeting and they were talking about attacking the space, playing with width, counter attacking and valuing possession.
Now I could have been sitting in a hockey meeting because they’re both ‘invasion’ games - you’re invading the opposition’s space and the principles around that are the same. It was an eye opener for me because again you go into another world and you think ‘wow, this is going to be totally different’ but fundamentally a lot of the things are the same. That was a real eye opener that first time. Now, what I'm trying to do in swimming is bring some of the team sport philosophies into the individual sport environment. This is the next challenge for me after working in three team sports.
In my own mind, I thought ‘what does team mean to them?’ because it’s quite a different thing to what a team means to a sport where you are absolutely relying on each other for the team to win. So it’s been an interesting challenge around getting them to understand what ‘team’ means in their context because it can't be my context, it has to be about what works for them. We’ve really built the team ethos in swimming far beyond what they’ve ever had before and that is clearly reflected in our results, which has been nice to see.
LR - You’ve kind of touched upon this already, but when you first start in a new role with a new sport, what are your first priorities?
CS - Before I take on a sport, I do a ‘deep dive’ to have a look whether I think it’s the right sport for me - can I make a difference? Will this sport shift? Is the sport ready for the shift that’s needed? Normally when I move or get approached for a job there is something that needs to change. I can remember being called a ‘Change Management Specialist’ and I kind of thought ‘what does that mean?’ but when I look back at my four sports I think they’re probably right about that.
So generally, when I look at a job I ask ‘what can I bring? What difference can I make? Is the sport ready for that?’ Sometimes in professional sport particularly, I know they’re not ready for the level of change that someone like me would want to bring in. You have to be able to think that in the end, you’re going to be able to get the job done.
So I take a look at the structure and I take a look at the people. It’s interesting thinking about these two areas in themselves because you think you might have the perfect structure, but if you don't have the right people to fill the roles, then the structure can fall down and vice versa. For me, I always look at those things together. In my mind, I might have a framework about what I think the structure should look like as we move forward, but then you’re trying to find and attract the right people. If you don’t have the right people at the right level then you need to adjust the structure and certainly through my career, I’ve done that. So I look at those two things in tandem - structure and people, and constantly evaluate both.
I usually give myself six months to engrain myself in the sport. So I speak to as many people as possible. I do that ‘deep dive’ that I talked about before and I do it ‘on the ground.’ After six months, I normally sit back and take some time for myself. I normally lock myself away for a few days and come out with what I think is the most appropriate way forward. Then you’ve got to get buy in, and that gets back to the people bit - you have to be able to bring your vision to life and then bring people with you; create something special and exciting to be part of.
Fortunately, I’ve been lucky, particularly in the swimming job, that we’ve had success pretty quickly. There is nothing that brings people with you more than having a bit of success. We had an equal best Commonwealth Games and Europeans Championships after one year, our best ever World Championships in 2015 and our best ever Olympics in 2016. So then I guess people think that you know what you’re talking about even though they might disagree with parts of the programme.
LR - Do you often work with other organisations or sports to share ideas? Can you give any examples of anything that you have implemented as a result?
CS - It’s massive. Going back to the system in the UK, one of the great strengths of the system is there are now around forty Performance Directors. When I started there were only four. We have a Performance Directors Forum where we share a lot of information around sports science, statistical analysis, coach development, team selection, team behaviours and how we set culture, etc etc. All of that stuff gets tossed around at various levels at the PD forum and I’m fortunate or unfortunate enough to have been elected Chair a few years back which has given me a great insight to other top programmes and how they operate.
I think this is one of the main reasons we’ve been able to sustain our success in Britain. For me, the level of sharing that goes on in this country is far beyond any other country in the world, I’m absolutely convinced of that. This was never more evident than just recently when we’ve been trying to come out of lockdown. We built key relationships across sport and I sat on the working group that took proposals forward to Government on behalf of elite sport. It was about how we can get the elite athletes back into training quickly and safely. We gathered a lot of information across the sports and it was phenomenal what we achieved in quite a short space of time. We were able to convince the government that we were able to manage it well, and then we had to prove we could manage it well. All those sorts of things say to me that the systems are really working. That is a real plus of the UK sport system and it’s such a privilege to be part of it - we have some outstanding people in performance sport in this country.
LR - How do staff know what the expectations are within the Elite British Swimming environment?
CS - We do quite a bit of work with our staff at different levels. I have a head of people development who principally works with the coaches and some of our other performance staff. Nigel (Redman) drives a lot of the culture pieces alongside me. We get together a few times a year with our staff and then with the wider staff and associates annually which can be over a hundred people across the Home Nations. This ensures that everyone is clear about what our goals are, what is immediately ahead of us, and gives them a flavour of the future so they can feel part of the journey and buy into what we are doing.
If I go back to the reason I took the job in swimming, when I did that ‘deep dive’ I discovered that in the London Olympics only 20% of the athletes swam their season’s best in the Olympics itself - so 80% of the team swam slower in the Olympics than they did all year. I thought ‘hmm that can’t be right, surely we can be better than that?’ When I did some analysis around it, I looked at the top teams and they were around 60%. So it’s a hard thing to do to swim fast earlier in the year and then swim fast again when the big dance comes with all of the pressure that comes with that.
We set about having this mantra ‘swim a season’s best at your benchmark meet’. So whether you’re a 15 year old or whether you’re 18 or you’re 30, the whole plan is to swim fast in the spring, and swim faster in the summer. So now the athletes coming through the system are already understand that.
In the old days athletes were rewarded for swimming fast in a meets that didn’t matter. They were rewarded for setting a fast time and being ranked 3rd in the World, but in the end when they came 15th at the World Championship, in my mind they’re 15th they’re not 3rd. At the time, in the sport’s mind they were 3rd. So we had to change the narrative around that from top to bottom. Everyone now is joined up with this idea that the time to swim fast is when it matters most.
In the end we’re not going to match the medal count of other nations because we don’t have the wide range of talent, but what we can do is maximize the talent that we’ve got. That is a crucial bit of what we do. By focussing on that goal, which is much more a process thing and something that everyone is capable of doing, then we’re more likely to achieve it.
We usually don’t talk to the athletes about medals, we don’t talk about a medal target, we don’t talk about anything to do with an outcome that can get in the way of us staying focussed on the process. The process for us is swimming the perfect race - who swims the perfect race right? So absolutely analysing every single bit of detail and working on it is the key to improvement.
If you look at someone like Adam Peaty, the fact that he not only breaks the World records, but he breaks them in major competitions, and not many people do that across the world in any sport. Many people break World records when it’s not a major championship, but he has got this incredible ability to rise and lift himself on the big stage. He is our talisman, he’s our guy that is now setting the standard for everyone else. He is an incredible athlete and most important he is an incredible person; humble and grounded in what is important.
If I think back to 2015, we’d come off a very poor World Championships in 2013, I’d just started in the job and we won just one bronze medal. Everyone was saying ‘British swimming is in a right state’ as we were also poor in London in 2012. We did manage to win the Europeans in 2014 for the first time in a while, and then the next World Championships were in 2015. I met with my boss halfway through the competition in Kazan and he said to me ‘do you realize if we win one more medal, it’s the best performance ever?’ and I replied ‘actually I don’t realise that and to be honest I wasn't even thinking about it. We’ve got a group of finals tonight and we’ve got 3 or 4 medal chances and all of tonight’s swimmers have got my attention. I’m happy to talk about it at the end of the meet, but I’m kind of not interested right now.’
That's kind of how the whole programme has evolved. We don’t talk about our performance until it’s over. We want to do our debrief well and we absolutely want to pull apart every single thing that we’ve done, and we want to learn about it and we want to get better. During the competition, and it’s the same with the athletes, we don't want to be thinking about a time or something that is not focussed on getting you the desired result. That is a massive shift that we’ve done in the sport - where you place your attention under pressure.
Our mantra at the minute is, if we get our season’s best percentage up into the numbers we want, the medals come to us - we don’t chase anything. They come to us because of our performances. Of course, you can’t equate for the phenomenal new athlete that has come out of another country and grabs a whole heap of medals - we can’t plan for that, but we can take care of our own performances. That has been a massive shift in the psychology of where we have taken the programme. It has sustained us through the last few Worlds and hopefully Tokyo next year - fingers crossed.
LR - Are there any leadership books/podcasts that you recommend all leaders listen to?
CS - I’m very fortunate that I have a personal coach that finds things for me. I know Ric Charlesworth and I thought his book ‘World’s Best’ was pretty impressive. He kept coaching and moved from the Australian women’s hockey team to the Australian men after I left. They were bronze medallists in London 2012 and they went on to win the World Cup in 2014. I was fortunate enough to go to Holland it and watch the final where I thought that was the best hockey I’ve ever seen played ever, by any team, then or since. They played the Netherlands, who were an excellent team and beat them 6-1 in the final. So ‘World’s Best’ is an impressive read.
Different things tend to come to me. One of the topics that we’re exploring at the minute is the idea of ‘toxic positivity.’ This is where coaches constantly give their athletes positive feedback, positive feedback, positive feedback and the problem with that is when people constantly hear all of these positive messages they lose sight of reality. Then it comes back to haunt them later on. You hear a lot of people from a mental health point of view talking about staying positive and being positive which is great, but if you over-do it there could possibly be some issues. There is some really interesting research going on around the whole issue of ‘toxic positivity’ I don’t particularly like the wording, but that’s what they’re calling it! There is stuff like that that interests me. I do like reading the short, punchy articles on areas of interest so that I can bring them up with my team and explore possibilities in our programme.
We hope you enjoyed this interview. If you enjoyed it please do let us know on our twitter account!
You can view interview number 7 with football manager and Primary Headteacher, Jamie Vermiglio here -https://leadershiprelay.weebly.com/jamie-vermiglio.html
If you enjoy hockey, you can view interview number 3 with the coach of Great Britain's Womens' Olympic Gold Medal winning coach, Danny Kerry here - https://leadershiprelay.weebly.com/danny-kerry.html