Two Coaches & a Coffee
With nearly 60years of professional experience between them across the world in Premier League, International Rugby, AFL and consulting in a plethora of other sports and industries; two old bulls of the performance, injury prevention, and rehabilitation world: Darren Burgess and Jason Weber catch up over a brew and discuss all things Sports Performance.
Two Coaches & a Coffee
Becoming a High Performance Manager Part 3.
Drop us a message and let us know what you'd like us to discuss!
Unlock the secrets to mastering high-performance management with Dr. Jason Weber, as he reveals his journey toward becoming an effective leader in interdisciplinary settings. Drawing inspiration from Jim Collins' "Good to Great," Dr. Weber shares powerful strategies for confronting harsh realities and emphasizes the importance of assembling the right team and cultivating diverse perspectives. Delve into the art of clear communication across departments, and discover how adopting the language of your colleagues can lead to groundbreaking collaboration and success.
Explore the profound simplicity of the Hedgehog Concept in leadership, where passion, potential for excellence, and economic drivers converge into a guiding principle for effective team-building. Dr. Weber underscores the role of understanding individual passions within a team to shape roles, particularly in sports environments. Inspired by the teaching hospital model, he highlights education's critical role in enabling seamless transitions and skill enhancement, ensuring everyone remains adaptable in the ever-evolving landscape of sports management.
Navigate the complex world of athlete and staff well-being management in demanding sports leagues like the AFL and EPL. Through a performance-focused lens, Dr. Weber offers insights into identifying baseline behaviors and creating a streamlined system based on passion, excellence, and performance drivers. With a strong focus on knowing oneself and understanding others, listeners are encouraged to grasp the dynamics of their environments and manage people effectively. Engage with Dr. Weber on LinkedIn for further insights and reflections on steering through the challenges of sports performance leadership.
SpeedSig Intro
Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com
G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee. You've got Dr Jason Weber here on Flying Solo again, probably for the last time in a little while. We've got Darren Burgess heading back from the UK next week. But, as kind of promised in a way, I'm going to finish off my little series on becoming a high-performance manager with my Art 3. Now part one and part two. They're already up. Got some great feedback from people on that.
Jason Weber:So a bit of today is probably referencing some of the points that people have made, what they want to know, what they want to hear and, to be honest, today is a little bit of really delving into background work. I probably did 15, 20 years ago looking at how I could figure out these new positions, particularly as high-performance management became a bigger part, where we become interdisciplinary managers. So you're not just coming from a medical, physiotherapy or a strength and conditioning background, sports, science, whatever. You've got to now run an entire department and coordinate it up the chain, which is kind of the fun part really. So we're going to talk through a couple of things today, most of them about how we get set up, how we make sense of things, but we're going to finish off with a couple of big take-home points I'd like to share, and hopefully they're quite practical for all the listeners. So we won't dawdle too long. We want to try and keep it to the 30 minutes.
Jason Weber:So today I'm going to reference again the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, which I referenced in the previous episode when we were talking about, you know, getting the right people on the bus. We talked about the bus and the band. Everyone kind of liked that one. But getting the right people on the bus and are they competent? And this book I read many, many years ago and in fact it's in front of me now and it's quite got quite the worn. Look to it Lots of faded color pens and writing.
Jason Weber:I'm a big believer in. I do like books. I do own a Kindle and I chew through that. But I do like books and I do like writing in them. There's an old saying from a great song by Matt Corby I bought the book but didn't turn the page, which is absolutely the most ridiculous thing ever. There is so much knowledge, but when I write in them and I put my notes in there, I really feel like I've engaged with that information. Anyway, so that's just a bit of part about me, but that's going to be a big part of our referencing.
Jason Weber:But the starting point for this conversation with myself and you guys is really about something I was asked only in the last couple of weeks that if I was to run a particular environment, given all the challenges that it contains, I was asked what are the big rocks, what would you do? As it contains? I was asked what are the big rocks, what would you do? How would you launch your campaign onto this program? What are the big rocks you'd move? And I thought about that and I thought, well, really I don't have enough information for that. Now, what I said and this reference is good to great, they talk about confronting the brutal facts. So my conversation with the person that asked me that was before I go moving any rocks, before I go changing anything, before I go try to influence where an environment's at, I need to understand the facts, which in Jim Collins talks about confront the brutal facts.
Jason Weber:One of the things I talked about and I would talk about with staff and whatever, is sorting cause and effect, so understanding what are the drivers. So, yes, you can get measurements, so you might get an injury count. We have this many injuries this year. Okay, now, the injuries aren't the cause, the injuries are the effect. So what's the cause? What's underneath that? What's driving? That? Sounds fairly obvious, but it is critical that we really evaluate hard, and I think in many of the other podcasts that I've done with Darren, I periodically get on my high horse about sports science and the way we think. But I think our ability to create really solid analysis and my view with that is particularly in a forensic environment, for instance, where you're being asked to review an entire environment say, what rocks would you move Right?
Jason Weber:The example I use is a TV remote, right? So for anyone that's watching a video of this, I hold up a TV remote which I'm doing now in front of the screen. I'm holding it up just any TV remote buttons facing towards the camera, but it's in front of me. So from that perspective, if it was you looking at it, you could see all the buttons on the tv remote, but from where I'm standing it's black. I can see some writing on the back and the battery cover, but it's black. So we're both looking at the same device but we're seeing it from different perspectives. Now you can make that more complicated by if we turned it to the side and we looked at it side on, I can now see that it's got a different shape. I can still see the back. I can see there's something on the front, but I'm not sure what Equally you guys, your managed position, could equally see. There's a different shape. It's not it's got a curved edge, but it's still got buttons on it.
Jason Weber:And the point of all that is one of the key bits of analysis with particular regard to high-performance management is understanding information from other aspects because, again, you can't be myopic and let's use me as an example From a strength and conditioning, the performance perspective, the physical, it can't just be all about that. We have to understand yes, there's a medical perspective, but what are they looking at? I need to change my perspective and we'll talk about this a little bit later on, about what I colloquially call speaking coach. But it's also about understanding the language of the people you're working with. I find and I would say it's a rule in my mind it's not necessarily a rule for everybody, but a rule for me would be I cannot be expected to lead somebody that I don't understand what their job is.
Jason Weber:So, as a guy who grew up in strength and conditioning, educated in that space. I've done a lot of work with physios over the years and because I came into the role you know in the late 90s, there were times where I traveled with international rugby teams and like where there was just myself and one physio so we would. I learned how to treat and I learned how to do a lot of soft tissue and how to manage fascial issues and how to work with the physio in that regard. So my point being that I learnt their language so I can speak with them. I'm not speaking at them saying, hey, you know this has got to happen, we need this, that Pointing fingers. Worse still, you know I can speak with them.
Jason Weber:Similarly, from a sports science perspective, if I've got people on staff and I want a machine learning model run, I understand the difference between a support vector machine and a short long-term memory system or any of the other ones, whatever gradient boosts, all the rest of it, so I can understand that stuff. Equally, I can understand the performance side. Am I a specialist in all of it? No, but in order to understand what people do, you need to be able to understand their language. We'll come back to that a little bit more in a moment in terms of speaking coach, but really the analysis piece is, if we go back to the TV remote, we want to understand the perspectives of other disciplines so that when we're doing a review we're really getting deep across all avenues, because it comes to the next part, and the next part is really about understanding that facts are super important.
Jason Weber:Now, famous US statistician once said God can have an opinion. Everybody else must bring data, and I love that. I think that's absolutely true and I think it's critical that when we get to things that are data, we need to understand what is the probability that they're analyzing what we think they are, which is often an issue in sport. We'll get to that again in a sec, but facts are better than dreams. Now, that is definitely a feature of Jim Collins' book, that you've got to focus on the facts, and he talks about confronting the brutal truth.
Jason Weber:Now, once you've been able to make measurement, you've been able to understand where an environment's at. There's a reality to how much we know, and it's a difficult one. For instance, gps is the great example at the moment. We think that GPS describes the entire environment, because we understand how far someone ran and how far they sprinted. That explains everything? Well, it doesn't. I mean, that's clearly again the gratuitous promotion. That's why I invented SpeedSig to answer the questions about how somebody runs.
Jason Weber:There's two different states. You can drive a car with perfect, brand new tires, you can drive at 100 kilometers, but if one of those tires blows up and you put the spare on and the spare is like two millimeters difference diameter, right, you're going to drive that same 100 kilometers, you can do it the same speed, but now your car's rattling around a little bit and your steering is going to be impacted and all that. So the point being, you have to have a rational response or understanding of how much of the system you can describe. Is it enough to do an eccentric hamstring? And that explains everything? I was across an issue recently where I saw that I had feedback to me that a physiotherapist and I'm not ragging on physios here but this particular individual pushed a hamstring injury so hard that he just drove Nordboard through the roof, but the kid continued to keep straining. Now there's no rationale for excessive hamstring strain.
Jason Weber:So the point being being able to, number one, analyze your environment hard for cause and effect, analyzing it from multiple perspectives. So you're covering off, because when you get to the point of saying these are the facts you want to make it clear to everybody in the environment, all right. So when you start sharing that, you're going to share that information. So if you're at an executive level, when you're recruiting for a job, whatever, you're going to share the information based on the facts, based on the information you have, and you'll explain like you would in a scientific paper. These are the limitations. I did that recently in a project I had to do where I looked at a group's demographics, their age of their list, their injuries, and I was able to say, look, these are the observations I can make, but that's all the information I have. I don't have everything, but this is where I'm at. And using some machine learning technology, we're able to say look, there's a 70% we can explain 70% of that outcome variable, which is typically like a rank order in a competition what team ranks in what position. We could explain 70% of the variability of that.
Jason Weber:Now, I've spoken before, I think, probably on one of the other podcasts. The great general, us General Colin Powell, once wrote that with 70% of the information, he's probably ready to make a decision and go forward. If you wait for too much more, the opportunity probably passes to make change. If you go too early, you don't have enough information. But anyway, that's a slight aside.
Jason Weber:So making sure you have the facts as much as you can, as rigorously as you can collect them. You need to make them clear. So you're going to need to make them clear to the leadership, but you're also going to take that when you establish a high performance department, you're going to take those facts and those facts are going to be what you present to your team. This is where we're at. These are the brutal facts. We don't have enough players on the field. We have a string of ACL injuries. We are not strong enough. Whatever conclusion you've drawn, they're going to be the foundation for what I was initially asked what rocks, what big rocks, would you move? That's going to start building out those objectives, because you can't change everything, and certainly not in a short period of time. Being a high performance manager is very much about playing chess, not checkers. It's not a quick fix. Some things are going to take up to years Now.
Jason Weber:I was in a position in the last full-time role I had for 12 years where there were issues between performance and medical staff and I made the assessment that the staff that we had in place were the right staff, but it was just being done wrong. So I kept the people on the bus, but I changed what they're doing on the bus and I changed the way we operated and I moved people around the seats, if you'd like to use that analogy. I got them doing things a little bit differently and we'll come to when I wrap up my five key points on really managing environment. I'm going to speak to that absolutely specifically, but we've got the facts we're going to make it clear. We need to make sure that those facts are being conveyed in a language that makes sense to people.
Jason Weber:Communication from a management perspective, in my opinion, is the responsible of the person putting words out of their mouth. Everybody's got a responsibility to listen, but there's only so much of that we can control. If we've got attention for a short period of time, we want to make a big bang with the bucks. Right, we want to hit that hard, which means we need to be clear. We need to use language that is inclusive. Right, we need to engage Probably you would say the lowest common denominator in the group you're speaking to. You need to be able to bring them in to the conversation, you need to engage them, you need to get them on side. That's part of building a team. But now we've got those facts, we've got them. We've got the brutal facts of where we are in that environment. So we know that environment.
Jason Weber:The next comes what Jim Collins calls his hedgehog concept. Now, this is a bit abstract, but it works. So, if you bear with me, now I'm just going to quote very quickly. The hedgehog concept is based on a famous essay, the Hedgehog and the Fox, by Isaiah Berlin. Now, he divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable. Now I'm going to cut to the chase a little bit here and say that the fox is trying to get the hedgehog, and the fox is smart and he understands the complexity of the world and he moves and he changes and he's fast, sleek, beautiful fleet of foot, he's crafty, he looks like a sure winner. The hedgehog, on the other hand, is a dowdier creature, like a genetic mix-up between a porcupine and a small armadillo. And yes, I am actually quoting this, I'm not, I'm reading this out, but it's cool.
Jason Weber:The fox is always after the hedgehog and he's coming up with different plans and he's devising a myriad of complex strategies, sneak attacks, and the hedgehog, when he's confronted by the fox, goes here we are, here we go again. Will he ever learn? And the hedgehog rolls up into a perfect little ball. And the hedgehog becomes a sphere of sharp spikes pointing out in all directions. The fox, bounding towards his prey, calls off the attack, retreating back. So each day it's the same battle.
Jason Weber:But the idea of the story is here that foxes can be scattered, diffused on many levels, where the hedgehog, on the other hand, simplifies a complex world into a single organising idea, a basic principle. So the idea is to be a hedgehog. How can we make our environment into a hedgehog, into simplifying, because you can't necessarily get all the rocks at once, which goes back to the first question. I get asked what rocks are you going to move? At the beginning? I don't know. I'm going to figure out. Where are the things I can move? What can I move quickly? What's a slower burn? Do we have to get rid of people? That's a hard fact In the last 48 hours. Have to get rid of people? That's a hard fact In the last 48 hours. Sorry, 24 hours of this podcast me recording this I've heard three people I know getting displaced from their jobs and they're great practitioners, but they've been moved on.
Jason Weber:I don't know why, but in your role, do you need to move someone on? Do you need to get the right people on the bus? First thing, now we understand our environment. We've got cause and effect. We've got facts. We're going to build it together. So how do we build a simplistic model going forward? And this accounts for not just your environments but how you can work with people sometimes. So the hedgehog concept is predicated on three things, like a Venn diagram, a three-piece Venn diagram.
Jason Weber:What are you deeply passionate about? What can you be the best in the world at and what drives your economic engine? So clearly, that's a business thing. But I always look at what are you deeply passionate about? Well, clearly we're going to sport. We're going to be passionate about that game, the environment we're in. But you're going to find that people have different passions. There are guys that are just fantastic in the gym. That's what they want to do. You've got guys who want to be running coaches. Some guys are more data oriented I mean guys and girls either. Or you've got physiotherapists who are really, really focused on um stage one, acute care so damaged athlete like I can really get that inflammation down quickly. I'm focused on that Great. You've got other physiotherapists who are very, very good at rehab and they're actually really good up into the running phase. I've got physio buddies now one or two that are in the ACL space and really doing some great stuff. Buddies now one or two that are in the ACL space are really doing some great stuff.
Jason Weber:So how passionate people are can help you build out your concept, your headshot concept. Keep it simple. Keep people where they're pumped about working. That's not always going to be the case. You're going to have to move some people, but you're going to then have to sell it, and one of the big ways to sell people moving roles is the education piece. I speak maybe not so much in this environment at this point, but my environment's always. I work on the idea of a hospital education system right. So hospitals work really well at educating from within. So they've got they build their nurses, their doctors up. They've got education tools. We teach. Teaching hospitals is what they call in America, but you can get people to change roles or move where you need them based on. We're going to educate you. We're going to teach you. So if I've got to get a strength and conditioning guy to do a bit more rehab, might be getting him to work with the medical guys to pull up his skills in that area. So understanding what people are deeply passionate about will help drive what they do. People will do what they're passionate about more regularly.
Jason Weber:Second part how can we be the best in the world? So what can we be the best in the world at? In business, clearly, let's just focus on being the best in the world at not just be competent, not just be okay. What can we be the best at? So, if we've got to change an environment, what can we be the best at Now? That may address your problems specifically in that, if your facts are, we need to get more people on the field. We lost too many people last year, right. How are we going to be the best in the world at that and be focused at it, if we don't have the skills, if we can't be the best at that, what can we be the best at? Can we be the strongest team, the fastest team? What can we be the best at? Can we be the strongest team, the fastest team and in the background, if you know, the big rock is. We need to keep people on the ground, but we don't have the staff for it. Then it's about can we educate them up or do we need to change them? We talked about the bus and the band. Yeah, it's good to have good people on, but you've got to have competence.
Jason Weber:I have worked with in the rehab space in particular. I can think of one guy in particular I worked with many years ago now, well over 10. He was a great guy. I enjoyed hanging out with him, went surfing with him a few times, had coffees, beers, whatever. But he was largely incompetent in rehab and I didn't have the time or space to teach him. I needed it done and back in the days there we had a very small team and he wasn't competent, so he had to go. How can I be the best in the world? I need to get people on on the field and keep them there, and we'd had a number of injuries in rehab, so that was just a no-go. So, getting your team together, what can we be the best at? And it's not a bad question to ask your group, which will come back when I talk about my five keys in a moment.
Jason Weber:The last part of the hedgehog concept what drives your economic engine? We're not worried about economic engine per se, but if we go back to our cause and effect and our understanding of the environment, our analysis, what is going to change your system immediately? An environment I looked at recently was simple. They had one of the highest number of players off the field, the highest number of players used in AFL for a year. Simple as that. Now we know from our analysis that that accounts for a very high proportion of where teams finish at the end of the year. So we've got to fix that If that's going to be the driver we need to get.
Jason Weber:After that, keep it simple. So then, when you're communicating, when we're discussing, even on a day-to-day level, you can be speaking to a coach and you see something's not quite going the way you want it. You can say, hey, bob, what's our engine? What do we need to do? Oh, boss, we need to keep people on the field. Okay, is what you're doing right now, helping us keep players on the field? Now, I don't know what Bob was doing at the time, but it keeps people focused.
Jason Weber:This is the idea of the hedgehog concept, but it keeps people focused. This is the idea of the hedgehog concept make a complex environment as simple as you can come, bring it down so it's very, very understandable, particularly when there's change involved. So when you're walking in cold, keep it simple as you go on further and further. Yeah, we can build more detail underneath, but try and keep people's focus simple and you keep everybody in front. So you keep that hedgehog concept which might be goal setting, if you want to call it that but you keep it front of mind and you might even start your meetings with it. You might even open with that to say, hey, guys, this is where we're at. We're driven by the need to, let's say, make our team stronger. So is that happening every week? Are we achieving that? Where are we at this week? You may even assign a staff member to it to say, hey, every meeting we come to, you're going to open up with telling us where we're at, and it's one of our crucial elements.
Jason Weber:So we've got three parts there. Get your analysis right, figure out exactly what the space is, cause and effect. Look at it hard, look at it from multiple perspectives. We've got to get those facts. We're going to make sure the facts are better than dreams. Don't BS anyone. Those facts go up the chain too, to the coach, by the way, and that's probably another whole podcast or lecture or whatever I could do, and maybe we'll get to that.
Jason Weber:And then the hedgehog concept is those three parts. Think about passion best. What's the driver? The three things that we can bring our environment together, because your environment is going to have to unite on that. And one of the key parts to getting an environment together is getting everybody on the same page with what's required. When people think, hey, you know, I'm the strength and conditioning department, this doesn't apply to me. Yeah, it does. We're all in the same boat. We're all paddling the same boat here.
Jason Weber:There's nothing that an S&C coach can do unless he's got the bodies coming back through physio, often through treatment and even performance treatment. If you listen to Stu McMillan and their performance therapy courses, which are awesome, they've got fantastic perspective, which I really love, which is a lot about treating an athlete for performance, not just treating injuries. Yeah, we've got to treat injuries at times, but treating an athlete for performance, not just treating injuries. Yeah, we've got to treat injuries at times, but athletes being treated for performance again, not the whole subject, but it's about getting people on the same page with that Righto. So let's, before I blow up my half an hour, because we covered a lot of ground here.
Jason Weber:Now I've got five keys which I am pinching out of Jim Collins' book again, but these keys are central to me. I've used these for years and years and years. Now we're going to expand them to six. I've already kind of introduced this first one we're going to do that first which is my speech coach, which is really not speak coach, but it's Neuro Linguistic Programming 101. Which is really not speak coach, but it's neuro linguistic programming 101.
Jason Weber:Use the language that the people are using, right the environment is using. If they already have a particular term for something, use it. Help communicate in a way that people understand. When you're talking to medical, try and use medical terminologies. If you're medically background and you talk to S&C staff, maybe don't go heavy on the medical side of it. Try and engage people, bring them in. When you're a leader in a HPM department, you're not trying to show off, you're not trying to pull people apart, you're not trying to demean people and you're certainly not trying to overlord them with the badge of you being the boss. Now there's a whole world of things on leadership styles. I'm not really going to go down that path. We can at another point. Potentially, maybe I'll get some feedback from viewers that they, like 12 people might come back to me. But here's my other five things. Once you know, yes, we're going to learn to use the language of the person we're speaking to. We're going to engage with them in their environment. We're going to go to them. We're not going to try and pull them to us per se.
Jason Weber:Right Now, five takeaways, or six. Number one learn to speak coach. Acknowledge that it's not always coach. You may need to speak strength coach. You may need to speak coach. Acknowledge that it's not always coach. You may need to speak strength coach. You may need to speak physiotherapist, athletic therapist, whatever. All right, you need to know those people in order to engage with them. All right. Now that's number one. Let's get the other five out.
Jason Weber:Lead with questions, not answers. I learned this many years ago from a very let's call him strong international rugby coach, but he was extraordinary. He taught me what I call meeting discipline, which is maybe another thing to add later on to the agenda. But you lead with questions, not answers. I'm not here to point the finger at people. I'm not here to, in the classic term, crow peck them. We want to engage. So sometimes, even though you know a direction you might need to go, it may not be about saying, hey, bang, this, is it? Hitting people over the head with a hammer. Bring them on the journey, ask questions.
Jason Weber:As a leader, number one is have some humility. You don't have all the answers that getting feedback from others in the environment may really help strengthen the position you have within your own head, but by leading with questions, you engage people and you bring them in, and it's absolutely critical to have your people on the same page and have them engaged. All right, which leads into two Engage in dialogue, debate, not coercion, all right. So, yes, we do want to, as much as I said then, yes, sometimes you will lead people where they need to go. At the end of the day, as a leader, often you have more information than everybody else and maybe you have a lot more experience, so you do need to.
Jason Weber:But I do believe that getting people to speak openly and bring debate is critical, which does come to your meeting structure. You've got to have time dedicated within a week or a training micro or mesocycle where people get opportunity to speak their mind. You've got to create, as they say these days, a safe environment, because people will fear my opinion. These guys don't want to listen. You've got to build that environment so that they can discuss freely. And again, now, kind of more and more than this comes to me, I think, the idea, the idea of discussing meeting disciplines probably another one for later. But, yes, you've got to have structures and it's time and everybody's rushed Everybody. And I spoke about it on one of my podcasts. If you look through our podcast list, a couple of months ago, I talked about time. If you look through our podcast list, a couple of months ago, I talked about time. We have no time, we rush.
Jason Weber:One of the most important things about a HBM is, I think, making time to build relationships, to build trust, to build confidence, so that people will speak, so people will share their expertise, and you would be surprised what people can bring when they actually engage. And that comes back to the. What are we really passionate about? I'm passionate about getting this environment working. I want you to come with me, right? You've got to give people the opportunity. Right, this one's a nasty one, right.
Jason Weber:Conduct autopsies without blame? Now, this is very it's business, but it's very, very military. I've had the pleasure of working for the last couple of years in some very, very high level tier one special forces or with some special forces operators not in their units and I've met guys that have, in every sense of the word, every sense, been at the tip of the spear in operations, and one of the things you learn off them is how they look at examining a task, what they call after action reviews, aar. Everything in military is an acronym, but an AAR is critical. What did we do? What did we do? Right, even when they're training, they'd be doing X, y, z, room entries and things.
Jason Weber:Okay, what happened? Where were you? What were you looking at? Okay, that's not right. Let's go Do it again. Do it again, but it's doing the review with a view to being as good as you possibly can. We go back to the hedgehog concept. What can we be the best in the world at? So we want to be the best of the world in keeping our people in the park. So we lost some guys this week. Why did we lose them? What happened? It's not assigning blame, but it's understanding.
Jason Weber:Now again, you go back to my thing about teaching hospitals right. Hospitals literally will review when there's a death. They will go through what happened and one of the biggest learning events I understand for doctors is understanding what happened. How can I learn from that event? Maybe it had nothing to do with me, but I've got to learn from it. Absolutely critical, I can't speak highly enough of that one. But again, this comes back to your meeting structure and probably back to the beginning, where we've got the information, we start to draw people in. If we've got people engaged and we're understanding what we're trying to do, then it's okay to say, right, this went south, why did it go south? And one of the really interesting things that I come across more and more and this is a speed sync thing is people saying, hey, we did everything we could, we didn't have enough information, and that in itself is a fantastic observation. We need more information. How are we going to find out more about this problem? We have All right. That's again another whole subject. But that autopsy is absolutely critical.
Jason Weber:I have seen that done extraordinarily poorly when it's a finger pointing exercise and no one digs that and it just creates animosity, anger and not good in the environment, because, remember they used to talk about in the Industrial Revolution. You know the heartbeat of the workforce. You had the person, the people, the people laboring, you know, in these appalling conditions was what drove it. So you need to keep your finger on your pulse. So that whole idea of keeping the finger on your pulse of your stuff is absolutely critical. So we're getting on pretty close for time here, but we'll continue.
Jason Weber:Build a red flag mechanism. Now. For me, that's not about yes, we all have the alert systems on people, who've got dashboards and they've got colors and they've got this and that and the other thing, and most of them, I think, make me feel more nauseous than anything else. But a red flag system for me in management is about understand what I just said. Like the fingers on the pulse, how do I know where my staff are at? Now, again, this whole conversation has been I'll talk about something later but again, when I monitor my athletes, I have two systems. I have a human system and a data system and I won't go into that now. But that same system, same concept, works with your staff Less data. There's not much data on your staff. But understanding humans is critical. Dan Pfaff, great coach, awesome coach. Never met the man but I love his work. I love what he writes about. He talks about.
Jason Weber:The best movement screen is watching athletes warm up Makes sense. You're going to see how they're building. You're going to see if they've warmed up quickly. Have they progressed? Are they going? My same thing I always would look at my staff. Where are they at? How are they behaving? How are they speaking? Is it changing?
Jason Weber:I know, you know, bobby, over there is a really gregarious guy. That's his up and about, that's his normal. Joey's a bit quieter. Then I come in the next day and Joey, who's quiet normally, is angry and aggressive. Clearly that's a no-brainer. But other things you get the guy who drinks one cup of coffee a day and all of a sudden you see him banging two or three down and you know there's a fatigue issue, understanding simple things like where's their family at. You know, when you have staff members that have babies critical, critical to understand you can't deny that stuff. Same with athletes. You've got to figure that because they have a life, they're not just machines. So that red flag mechanism for me is not a database thing, it's understanding your people and understanding what sets them off.
Jason Weber:We talked about in, I think, two episodes back about understanding how people how do you handle stress? What do you do when you're stressed? How people how do you handle stress? What do you do when you're stressed? What do the staff do when they're stressed? How do they react? How can you cut it off at the pass?
Jason Weber:One of the things we certainly see in AFL and while I've no experience directly in EPL, I know this happens as well when you've got a jammed schedule In AFL, it would be let's say, we've got a six-day break and we got a bunch of like moderate, just like low-level ankles and things from one game. So the physios end up working a lot like big hours just trying to get there, going in and out of the buckets of ice and hot and mobbing joints and they're just, they're gassed. They're humans. You have to understand how that works with them, right? How is that handled? So that red flag is really about understanding the baseline behaviors of your staff and how they work and I would always counsel understand who people talk to, because sometimes you're not the best person. You may not be With athletes. When I'm monitoring athletes yeah, I'm not always the best person to speak to, not by far. You don't always mesh with everybody, but you've got to find the person that is good for that person. So build a red flag mechanism absolutely critical and one of the key take. I'm sorry I'm throwing my pens around my desk right, so I think I I stall because we've covered so many subjects, but I think I am comfortably toward the end. I think I had five points there total with speaking coach.
Jason Weber:So as we wrap up this one, this episode, let's just quickly think about what I've talked about In the first two episodes. We talked about know thyself, know thy enemy, know yourself, then know the rest of the people you're going to work with. Three is a bit more about putting it together. This one's been about what are the rocks? We've got to understand cause and effect, do our analysis of the environment. Make sure we're doing it from multiple perspectives. We get the facts. Facts are better than dreaded. We've got to confront the brutal facts. We've got to make it clear, use the language people understand and share it and make that the cornerstone of us going forward. But you're going to build that into a system where it is as simplified as possible, which is the hedgehog concept what can we do with passion? What can we be the best at? What drives our performance? How do those three things interact? And then we took our little five take-homes, which were a lot about how we handle people.
Jason Weber:So, in summary here before Darren gets back, I hope the last three episodes have been valuable. If they have been valuable and you love it and you want to hear more, dm me on LinkedIn, easiest place to get a hold of us. Dm me on LinkedIn Easiest place to get a hold of us. I hope this helps people get in their heads a methodology to move forward, because this space is challenging for people. It's a relatively new position across sport and it's becoming more and more accepted, and it's one that people are going to have to get better and better at. So farewell, travel well, and I guess the next time you hear from me will probably be with my little mate. Thanks a lot for your time.