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Episode 4 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: How do we decide when it matters?
Episode 4 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: How do we decide when it matters?
A senior player loses his temper with a member of the support staff, and someone has a quiet word with him. A younger player does the same thing and is benched. Dr. MCB starts with what the people in that dressing room learn from the two responses, and asks how an organization can make decisions that match the values it says it holds, especially once it is under pressure and already hoping for a particular outcome. She draws on Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick's 2004 paper on ethical fading, where the ethical part of a decision becomes harder for the person making it to see, and on what healthcare and aviation call Just Culture and the research into procedural justice. The suggestions are a way of working rather than a tested method: look back at the decisions already made and ask what was protected when two things the organization cared about came into conflict (she calls this conflict archaeology); keep abuse, harassment, retaliation, welfare concerns and credible risks of serious harm out of ordinary team discipline and in an independent pathway, with a lower threshold in youth sport; agree a few questions to ask whoever is involved, including whether the same process would follow for someone with less standing; write down who decides what; and after a loss, wait seventy-two hours before major decisions unless they were planned beforehand, which never means waiting on an urgent health or safeguarding concern. To begin this week, put your last three discipline decisions side by side and ask someone you trust what they notice.
This series draws on The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership by Dr. Marie Claire Bourque and Madeline Antony (Routledge). Find the book.
Dr. Marie Claire Bourque. Her newsletter, Dr. MCB’s Curiosities, is at curiosities.dr-mcb.com.
Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.
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Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.
In the last few episodes, we've talked about the pressures people work under in sport, whether it feels safe to speak up, and what can make a sport culture toxic.
Today, I want to spend some time on how an organization makes decisions, because this is where a lot of what we've been talking about becomes visible. We can have good intentions and agree on our values, but we also need to think about what we'll do when those values become difficult to follow. And ideally, we should have that conversation before we're under pressure and already hoping for a particular outcome.
Welcome back to Curiosities. I'm Dr. Marie Claire Bourque. I'm a psychiatrist, and this is a show for people who are curious about their own minds, and everyone else's.
Let's take a situation that I think many people working in sport will recognize. A senior player loses his temper with a member of the support staff. Someone takes him aside and has a quiet word with him, and then everyone moves on. A younger player does the same thing, and he gets benched.
Now, put yourself in that dressing room for a moment. You've watched both things happen, and you're trying to understand what's expected of you. You may have been told that everyone is held to the same standard, but that isn't quite what you've just seen. And if you later had a concern about the senior player, you'd probably take that experience into account when deciding whether to say anything.
Most organizations already have words for how they want people to behave. You can walk into almost any dressing room or head office and find some version of excellence, integrity, teamwork and respect. I expect most of the people who chose those words meant them. But respect can be written on the wall of a place where people are afraid of the coach, so we need to look at what happens alongside the words.
We learn how a place works through being there. We notice what gets rewarded and what gets ignored. We notice who gets another chance, and whether the response changes depending on who was involved. The psychology of learning has been describing this for decades. We learn from the consequences of our own behaviour, but we also learn by watching what happens to other people.
So, in that dressing room, nobody has to deliberately teach that senior players have a different set of rules. People can come to that conclusion on their own, from what they've watched happen.
It's understandable to call this hypocrisy, and sometimes that may be part of it. But I don't think calling it hypocrisy gets us very far on its own. I think many of the people making these decisions do believe in the values they've committed to, and I'm interested in what happens when following those values becomes inconvenient or costly. If we only treat this as a problem with someone's character, we can end up having another conversation about integrity without changing how the next decision gets made.
There's a paper from 2004 by Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick that I think is useful here. They described something called ethical fading, which is when the ethical part of a decision becomes harder for the person making it to see.
For example, a coach may begin with a question about how someone treated a member of staff. But there's an important game coming up, the player is needed, and there are concerns about how he'll react to being disciplined. Gradually, the conversation becomes about keeping him available and managing the situation. The question about how people should be treated can become less prominent, even though nothing about the original incident has changed.
The authors also described how language can contribute to this. Think about explanations like, "That's a football decision," or, "We have to consider the context," or, "We need him happy." Someone can say those things and sincerely believe that they haven't compromised their values. They may have come to understand the decision mainly as a practical problem they need to solve.
I want to be careful about what we take from this. It was a theoretical paper, and it wasn't about sport. It can't tell us what any particular coach was thinking. It also doesn't remove responsibility for the choice. What it gives us is a reason to pay attention to how we describe decisions, especially when we're under pressure to reach a certain answer.
And if pressure can make it harder to recognize that a decision is about values, we need to do some of that thinking earlier. By the time we're discussing whether we can afford to bench a particular player, we already have an interest in the outcome.
I'd begin by looking back at decisions the organization has already made. I call this conflict archaeology, which is really a way of asking what we've protected when two things we cared about came into conflict.
We sit down with the people who have had to live with the consequences and look back over the last year or two. We might say that development matters, for example, and we also care about results. Most of the time, we'd like to believe those things support each other. But there will be occasions when giving someone an opportunity to develop involves accepting some uncertainty about the result. What have we done when that happened?
If results have won every time, that's something we need to understand. There may have been reasons for each individual decision, but when we look at them together, we may see a pattern that doesn't fit very well with what we've been saying about development.
These conversations often become useful when someone brings up a decision that still bothers them. People get uncomfortable, and there can be an urge to explain why it had to happen that way or to move on to something less contentious. I ask what we protected and what we gave up, and then I try to give people enough time to answer.
We also need to notice who gets heard in these conversations. The people who already have a voice are more likely to get their concerns discussed. A player from abroad or a woman on an all-male staff may have experienced a decision differently, and we may need to make room for that account. Otherwise, we can leave the meeting feeling that we understand what happened when we've really only heard from the people who were comfortable speaking.
This hasn't been tested as a method. It's a way of working out what to ask about, and of noticing things that may have become so familiar that we've stopped questioning them.
From there, we can look at how we'll make the next decisions, including discipline. First, some things should never be treated as ordinary team discipline. Abuse, harassment and retaliation are examples, along with welfare concerns and credible risks of serious harm. Those need an independent pathway outside the coaching chain. Nobody with a competitive or reputational interest should be able to override that process or hurry it.
In youth sport, the threshold should be lower, so if we're unsure whether something belongs in that pathway, it still goes there. And any urgent medical, welfare or safeguarding concern needs immediate action.
For other incidents, we should agree on a few questions and ask them whoever is involved. We need to understand what happened, how serious it was and whether it's part of a pattern. Then we should consider whether we'd follow the same process if someone with much less standing had done the same thing.
That last question is useful because we can be very good at explaining why a particular person's circumstances are different. Sometimes there will be a relevant difference. But we should be able to explain what it is and why it matters to the decision.
We also need to think about what everyone else will learn from our response. Going back to the dressing room example, the decision affects the player and the member of staff, but it also affects the people who watched what happened and are now deciding what they can expect from the organization.
The response should come from a range we agreed on beforehand. The person needs to understand what standard was broken, what the consequence is and when it will be reviewed. We should also write the decision down in the same way each time. One page is enough to record what happened, what we decided and why. Without that, we're relying on people's memories when we try to explain to the next coach what the standard actually was.
Some of this borrows from what healthcare and aviation call Just Culture, including the distinction between an honest mistake and a reckless act. It also draws on research into procedural justice, which is concerned with how people experience the process used to reach a decision. Much of that research comes from workplaces outside sport, and it suggests that people are more willing to accept an outcome they didn't want when they can see that the process was consistent.
The pathway I'm describing hasn't been tested as a tool in sport. It won't make the decision for us, and it can't guarantee that we'll get it right. What it can do is make it easier to notice and question a response that seems to depend on someone's status.
This still leaves room to take people's circumstances into account. We wouldn't give a ten-year veteran with a chronic knee problem the same training load as a rookie, and the group can understand that if someone explains the reason. But when we're talking about how someone treats another person, we should be able to expect the same standard of behaviour, regardless of how important they are to the team.
We also need to be clear about who gets to make which decisions. Who picks the team, who handles discipline and who decides playing time? Who clears a player medically, and who signs off on spending?
These are what I mean by decision rights. They need to be written down, because if they aren't, the person with the most status in the room can end up making the call, whether or not it was theirs to make.
One way to get a sense of how clear this is would be to ask three people, separately, who has the final say on those decisions. If the responsibilities are settled, you should hear the same answers. If you don't, it's worth finding out why. People may be working from different assumptions, or someone may be benefiting from the ambiguity. It's a rough check, but it can help us see where a conversation is needed.
And we need to include the leader in all of this, because whatever process we agree on has to work during the worst week of their season too.
Researchers studying how organizations respond to threat have described attention narrowing and people falling back on familiar ways of doing things. That work comes from outside sport. My impression is that, in a team, a loss can push decisions back toward habit, hierarchy and protecting people with status, even when nobody has consciously decided to change the process.
The people around a leader may adapt before the leader notices. If you lead a team, think about the last time you lost three in a row. Did anyone become more careful about what they told you? Did someone who would usually raise a concern stop doing that?
It can be difficult to recognize this from the inside, because you're trying to understand what's going wrong at the same time that people may be giving you less of the information you need.
This is why I'd want an agreement about major decisions after a loss. I'd suggest waiting seventy-two hours, unless the decision was planned and written down beforehand. During that time, we can write down the changes that feel urgent and come back to them once we've had some distance from the result. Some may still seem necessary. Others may have had more to do with how it felt to lose.
I can't give you a study that establishes seventy-two hours as the right number. It's a practical guideline, and there isn't much research on losing runs in elite sport. It also never means waiting to act on an urgent health or safeguarding concern.
That distinction between research and a proposed way of working matters throughout this conversation. Most of what I've described draws on work from hospitals, aviation and other workplaces. A small number of interview studies in elite sport point in a similar direction. People who had led culture change described the importance of clear roles and limits on power, and the limits of trying to change things through motivational appeals alone.
I think that gives us reasons to try these approaches and pay attention to whether they help. We should also be willing to change them if they aren't doing what we hoped. Having something written down is useful, but we still need to look at how it works when there's a real decision to make.
If you want to begin somewhere this week, I'd suggest looking at the last three discipline decisions in your organization. Put them beside each other and ask someone you trust what they notice.
Would someone from outside think the same standard had been applied? How much did it matter who was involved? And what would the people watching have learned from each response?
You may find that the decisions are consistent and the reasons for any differences are clear. Or you may find something you need to discuss before the next incident. Either way, you'll have a more useful conversation about your values if you can connect them to decisions people remember.
This episode is part of a series drawing on the book Madeline Antony and I wrote, The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership, published by Routledge.
If you know someone working in sport who would find this conversation useful, please share it with them. And thank you for listening.
Curiosities is education and it is not medical advice. The views here are mine. They don't represent any hospital, university, or organization I work with. If something in this episode sounded like you, bring it to a clinician who can actually assess you. If you want more, follow the show wherever you're listening or watching, and the newsletter link is in the show notes.