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Ep 35. John Steele – On leadership in high performance environments

3rd January 2019 by tammyparlour Leave a Comment

Episode 35 is an interview with John Steele, currently Executive Director of Sport at Loughborough University.

Through the years, John has had some powerful sporting positions including CEO of organisations like the RFU – and UK Sport. He’s been an army officer, an athlete, a coach, and as well as his role at Loughborough he’s also Chairman of The English Institute of Sport.

We talk about the sporting system, creating high-performance environments, and how you go about maintaining a leadership focus when you have so many competing pressures.

John Steele has a unique blend of experience in creating and leading high performing teams, developed as a professional sports coach and Chief Executive in the private, public, and not for profit sectors.

He served as an army officer having been trained at the prestigious Royal Military Academy Sandhurst to lead teams in high pressure environments. On leaving the army he worked in the corporate world before becoming a professional rugby player. On finishing a playing career that spanned over 400 first class games,including matches against Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, John turned to coaching and successfully led Northampton Saints to become European Champions. He became Executive Director on the Saints Board during a period of unprecedented off field growth including a share issue and stadium development. Johns experience in rugby union also saw him serve on the England Rugby Board during the successful world cup campaign of 2003 and be appointed as CEO of the Rugby football Union.

The winning of the bid for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics saw John take up post as CEO of UK Sport, which he led for a six year period through Beijing and into London. His Team GB involvement spans nine different Games including the record breaking Rio Olympics and Paralympics, and the recent winter Games in Pyeongchang.

Having served as Group Chief Executive of the Youth Sport Trust, he is now leading an ambitious change programme as Executive Director of Sport at Loughborough University.

Building on his life long passions of leadership and sport, he founded Unforgiving Minute, a niche consultancy with unique leadership development expertise from high performance sport.

John succeeded Steve Cram as Chairman of the English Institute of Sport. The EIS delivers a range of performance impacting sport science and sport medicine solutions to over 40 Olympic and Paralympic sports along with a select number of non-Olympic sports.

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THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX: 3.1.19 – Ep 35. John Steel – On leadership in high performance environments

HOST: TAMMY PARLOUR

T: Welcome to a Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views on what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

Episode 35 is an interview with John Steele, currently Executive Director of Sport at Loughborough University. Through the years, John has had some powerful sporting positions, including Chief Exec of organisations like the RFU and UK Sport. He’s been an Army Officer, an athlete, a coach and as well as his role at Loughborough, he’s also Chairman of the English Institute of Sport. We talk about the sporting system, creating high performance, environments and how you go about maintaining a leadership focus when you have so many competing pressures.

Loughborough University is such an iconic sporting incubator. I first wanted to know what he thought the role was of an institute like Loughborough.

R: It’s the sort of question we ask ourselves all the time, because you could come at that from a Higher Ed perspective. So, we’re a University and if you look at perhaps where we were 20 years ago, we weren’t sitting amongst the nation’s elite academically, so the focus and the reputation was built on sport and in an amazing way over a number of decades and we now have that global reputation in sport. But what’s also happened in the last, sort of, ten years is that the academic attributes and capability has massively improved, to a point now where we’re right up there in the top five in The Times and Sunday Times league tables, your Guardian and so on and so on.

I: What’s enabled that to happen?

R; Well, we’ve had a very good, and I have to say this, ‘cause he’s my boss, but I do mean it, we’ve had a very good Vice Chancellor who has made things happen, who has changed people’s perspectives of us, so Bob has really looked at driving academic excellence, driving us up the league tables which are very big in Higher Ed, because of, you know, students, parents, people look at those to decide where they’re going to go, but suddenly, Loughborough is up there. You know, you’ve got your Oxford’s, your Cambridge’s, your Durham’s, suddenly Loughborough’s started to be in that cohort. But Loughborough is here, primarily, to give a really high quality student experience to people that have come here. But at the same time, we have a broader, what we describe as ecosystem here, so it’s not just about come here, play sport for your Uni, we have people cited here that value an excellent sporting environment and the infrastructure and the facilities we’ve built, the people we’ve got here, we’ve got National Governing Bodies based at the Headquarters here, we’ve got other sporting organisations at Sport Park. All of these different stakeholders create this interaction and this synergy which is like no other place and, you know, many Unis, sort of, say, well, we can take on Loughborough at this and that, you know, often aren’t their first teams will be playing our seconds or our thirds, because our first teams are in National leagues and performing very differently. I have to say, that Higher Ed sporting competition is getting greater and great and a lot of Universities investing a lot more in facilities, but we remain there as a global brand in terms of the sporting university, and what we’ve done recently is, we’ve integrated our academic offer, so a very very strong School of Sport with the doing sport here, and getting out there and actually applying what you’re learning.

I: What the point of sport?

R: I suppose, for me, sport for sport sake, so what’s the point of art or music or anything, there’s just the joy of it, it’s one of the, you know, there are better scholars than me, but whether it’s an extension of play or whatever it might be, there’s a human need for me to have sport and everyone is better off for being involved in sport, not necessarily participating, you could be a volunteer, you could be a coach, you could be anything, an official, but your life is slightly richer for having it. So, for me, there’s a, sort of, social benefit, there’s a personal benefit, there’s a health benefit, there’s a mental health benefit as well as a physical health benefit. It’s an aid to learning, it’s a way of reinforcing behaviours we might find desirable in our society, it’s a way of developing traits, leadership, capability, teamship, all these things. There’s the joy of doing them within sport, and then there’s how do I apply these for broader benefits in life and sport is brilliant at those broader benefits.

I: You’ve been an athlete and a coach, you’ve also been CEO at organisations like the RFU and UK Sport…

R: If you’re wanting to parallel those two things, you’d probably go back to some basic principles and I think one of those principles where you could say an individual performer, an assistant, is focus, so I think where systems fail or become cumbersome or clumsy but where they lose focus on what’s important, they try and be all things to all people and it’s the same with an athlete or a player, but actually if they really understand what’s the most important thing for me to focus on, and focus on it, they tend to be successful and if you let that get clouded, they’re less successful and then I think you’ve probably got of the, sort of, values of principles of sport. I think if we forget those, either as individuals or systemically, we’re at risk of not being successful and that might be the integrity that comes with sport, fair play, opportunity, the sorts of principles that we hopefully don’t take for granted, but are so embedded sometimes, they can be forgotten.

I: But in a number of high performance environments, have there been quite similar difference? Can you compare and contrast that a little bit?

R: Yeah, it’s interesting you say that, because I think, with experience and time, I realise how similar they are and that could be corporate world, it could be the Military, it could be sport, but actually some of the basics remain consistent through all those sectors, however much we analyse and we look at things and, for me…

I: What would you say the basics are?

R: Well, I think the basics are, and this is going to sound slightly peculiar, but there has to be…I mentioned focus before, there has to be an element of selflessness and where, and it sounds a bit fluffy that one, but where I’ve seen either individuals or systems become too self-serving, they lose what they’re about and, you know, there has to be a number of people and organisations and systems that are doing stuff for others, they’re supporting others, they’re the unsung heroes behind the scenes. If you have a cohort of those, anything’s possible, but if those are undermined in perhaps a society that likes taking selfies and I say that as a grumpy old man with teenage daughters, but in my day, if someone looked at my old Kodak camera and found on my film of 24 frames that 20 of them were of myself, I probably would have been teased and they would have said, what on earth, you are the most egotistical person I’ve ever met. Now, that is the norm, so on people’s cameras, they’re even designing cameras to take selfies, so in a world where it’s about putting self front and centre, you need to have a lot of people who are prepared not to do that to keep health in any system and sport especially, so that selfless bit, you need those with focus, it’s all about performing, then you need a huge cohort of selfless people to support that.

I: Just delve into that a little bit, you talk about focus being important, it must be incredibly hard to keep that focus when you’ve got so many competing pressures, you’ve got media, you’ve got politics, you’ve got funding pressures on you, how do you maintain the focus?

R: I think the, you know, there’s a lot work being done with the Institute of Sport and UK Sport about what it takes to win and in a way that’s the pruning, if you like, of the secondary noise, it’s getting rid of some of that…’cause you’re right, in a world where there’s a lot of noise, how do we maintain and find focus? Well, we’ve got be really accurate, we’ve got to say, this is most important, two/three things, and that is what we’re going to focus on, regardless of the noise and that takes a discipline and a resilience. And there’s always been noise, but I think probably the advent of the digital age and social media means that that noise has become louder and coming from all sources, so all the more reason to have the discipline to know what matters and how you stay on that matters.

I: So there’s something about making sure one articulates it as well, in order to keep coming back to it.

R: Yeah, and I think in an environment when you’re always looking for progression, it’s easy to grab and maybe it’s the, sort of, antithesis of marginal gains, let’s grab as many small things as we can, but there’s a limit, sometimes let’s actually focus on the big thing, that isn’t the 2%, it’s the 98% and it’s the, you know, it’s the super strengths which, you know, sports psychologists talk about actually, if we get that right, the 2% is less important isn’t it, obviously? So I think, you know, in a time where you’re always looking for ways of being better, just doing the basics right is still paramount.

I: When you look back at all the positions or roles that you’ve had, what, sort of, pops out of your head as something that you were proud of?

R: I think, I mean, you mentioned it at the start, I think, with time, I’ve worked out, kind of, what makes me tic is being part of a team and that’s…it sounds a bit yell, whenever anyone says that, but it’s what either motivates me or demotivates me. If I’m part of a team that I’m proud of and I’m proud of the interactions, might not always be successful or might not always agree, might be a certain critical tension in the team, but if I have that, I’m happy and I’m even happier if I can create those teams and be part of leading them, then I’m really ticking. What disillusions me very quickly are when those teams either don’t have the right values or principles within the team or there’s something within the team creates disloyalty or fragmentation, that’s disillusioning, so, you know, for me, when I was a rugby player, the greatest feeling, or as a coach, on earth, is sitting in that changing room, shoulder to shoulder with a group of people and outside that room, you can hear the noise, you know you’re about to go and face the opposition, the adrenalin’s pumping, what a wonderful feeling and similarly win or lose, afterwards in the changing room, it was a collective experience. You sit there with your colleagues, with your team mates, and there’s no feeling like that, so when you’re too old and long in the tooth to do that as an athlete or a player, recreating that, sort of, togetherness with other teams in the workplace, for me, is not quite as good, but nearly.

I: So how do you go about shaping a culture to create that and to get the best performance out of athletes, or out of colleagues?

R: I think, there’s a good old saying about work/life balance and every time it’s used now, I, sort of, say to people, I think it’s a bit antiquated, there is no such thing, this, sort of, belief that there’s a divide, you have work and you have life, you now just have life and inside that is work, emotion, social, it’s all mixed now, because social media has, sort of, bridged the gaps where everything pervades everything else. So, actually, for me, you have to care about the whole person, you have to lead the whole person. So this 9-5 idea that you’re leading a JD or a Job Description of a person, doesn’t work anymore, you can’t lead that person without knowing them, without knowing their fears, without knowing what motivates them, what inspires them, all that is one person, so, to create a great team and to lead and do justice to that team, you have to be able to know all the individuals in it and then the collective dynamics of all those individuals, so when is one person hurting or struggling, another person’s fine, when does that flip round under a different environment? And there isn’t one size fits all, you can’t say, you know, this is how this team is going to be run, it’s about situation or leaderships, leaders that go in there, know their people, care about them and show they care about them and then suddenly, and this is what happens in the Military is, those people know they’re being looked after and you create a loyalty, so when you want more from that person, when you say, look, we’re in trouble here, we need more from you, over and above what you could reasonably be expected to do, they say, I’m prepared to give that, ‘cause you cared about me. So there’s this develop…you develop trust, you develop care and support and you get discretionary performance, not just the minimum.

I: It’s interesting what pops into my head was, how does someone in a leadership position, like yourself, also get that?

R: Well you ask for it when you need it, you know, the idea of the…and I come from the, sort of, you know, Military and rugby and, you know, as a young man, the belief that to show weakness, you’re just showing something that could be exploited, but, of course, there are times for leaders to show their vulnerability and be authentic. There are times when they shouldn’t do that because they need to be strong, but at the quieter moments, you can say to your team, look, I’m experiencing this at the moment, I’m struggling a bit, I just need you to understand that and then, you know, good followship, good teamship will support the leader. So, there’s this give and take, but it’s all based on a mutual respect and a loyalty created by you having given in the first place, you know, don’t expect to get a return if you haven’t invested.

I: When I first started doing these interviews, one of the first people I spoke to was Goldie Sayers about how she felt being awarded an Olympic Bronze Medal eight years later, because of another athlete’s doping situation. How does someone in your role respond, so think and feel personally and professionally, when you hear news of another doping incident coming on?

R: Well, we can only do what we can do and if we can say to ourselves, we’ve done everything we can systemically in the past and then, of course, technology catches up, then it’s very sad. No-one could compensate Goldie, ‘cause people talk about, well, what with the financial aspects of being, what about the pride, what about…no-one can compensate her, so, yes, it’s good that it’s now, you know, justice has been done, fairness has been seen to be done, but sadly, that still doesn’t undo the feeling of being cheated and not just her, just the system but I think, you know, we have UKAD, we have robust and really driven anti-doping system, we’ve got broader ethical issues within sport now, not just doping, which we’re addressing in terms of culture and things, so I think, sad though it is, I don’t look at our system and say, we dragged our feet, I think our system did what it could in the time it…and the technology it had at its fingertips at the time.

I: What do you think is the next challenge to be faced by sports leaders like yourself?

R: I think hard decisions. The problem with systems and we’ve been talking about, you know, high performances in this country, if you’re not careful, you can look for systemic answers to people challenges. So, what I mean by that is, when there were cultural issues started to come out, we introduced lots of governance checks. Now, of course, our governance has to be right, that is the framework we have to work with it, but freedom with a framework is the way I like to lead, so I’ll give a framework, but then you have to have freedom within it, you have to be empowered, you have to be able to express yourself, everyone has to be different. The more rigid and tighter you make that framework, you squeezed some of those personal differences out and governance solutions to leadership challenges are misplaced. You will not change leaders’ behaviours by introducing more governance checks. In fact, it puts them into rooms to fill in forms, not where they need to be, which is in amongst their people, role-modelling, challenging, making sure behaviours are right. So, it might help us because we can rag rate issues and say, look, we’re looking at this, but what do we do with that, how is that driving behavioural change and if the answer is, well, we don’t know, but look, we’ve monitored it, we’re on the wrong path. If the answer is, we’re getting more leaders standing up for what they think is right and leading their people more closely, then that’s fantastic.

I: How do you define success personally?

R: I think, it’s changed for me quite a lot, I think most people, or certainly me in my younger years, it’s usually onwards and upwards and if you can take an incremental step up the ladder, whatever that ladder is, you feel like you’re achieving, and some of that might be linked with job satisfaction, remuneration, there are lots of different factors. I think I’ve got to a point, I’ve been very fortunate in some of the roles I’ve had, and people I’ve worked with, so I’ve got to the point where it’s not onwards and upwards for me, it’s about trying to find things where I’m close enough to sport, because I have had jobs where, and you could be in any industry, because you’re, kind of, you’re leading almost generically, so the job I have at Loughborough here is fantastic, it’s got me closer to sport. I Chair the English Institute of Sport, which I thoroughly enjoy, it’s innovative, it’s dynamic, so that works for me, that combination, so I suppose success for me at the moment is, can I impact directly on sport? Satisfaction for me at the moment is, I need to be closer enough to sport, you start as an athlete, you cross the white washer and you get too old, then you coach, you’re quite close but not, then you go from coach to leader and you’re getting further and further from the playing surface. I quite like being a little bit closer to it, without getting too close that I look ridiculous at my age.

I: Just talking about close to sport, are you still playing rugby or any…

R: I don’t play rugby on the grounds that I would be awful now and my knees are shot and it would just be too dangerous, but I enjoy, you know, I played squash for years, I play golf, I go to the gym…

I: Squash is hard…

R: Yeah, I had a knee op last year which ten years of squash created. Funnily enough, no my rugby, but my squash, it is highly attritional , but such a wonderful game, I love it. So, there’s always got to be sport in my life. I found out, when I didn’t do as much sport, I didn’t feel as complete, I didn’t feel at peace, so it doesn’t matter what it is, I just have to be involved.

I: We’re just going to ask you some quick fire questions to wrap things up. What did you eat for breakfast?

R: I have one of these, sort of, supplement shake things, so I have one of those shake things and I put in there mixed grains, oats, some of this powder called Huel, you may…that’s advertising, and also some seeds, different types of seeds, so I put all that in, I put some boiling water in and shake it all up and I have that, but then that sounds, wow, that’s so, sort of, performance-orientated, then I come in here and about 11 o’clock I have a big cookie, so it’ the, sort of, my guilty secret…

I: Good to have the balance, yeah.

R: …yeah, cancels out that, sort of, healthy breakfast and I’m not averse for having a full English when it’s right, but not that often.

I: Favourite piece of kit?

R: Favourite piece of kit, I am, like most sports people, a kit person. I had something and I’m not very technical, but I had something given to me recently, ‘cause I’ve got an Apple computer and it was a, sort of, junction box with as many different leads that you could put in to allow for all the difference that Apple never fits the right plug does it, but this…and it came in a nice little, sort of, leather executive carry case, so I quite like this, I get it out whenever I can and just put it on the table to show people, so that’s my latest gimmick. But I am very susceptible to kit and gimmicks.

I: Sporting hero?

R: Sporting hero, wow. Yeah, it’s…I’ve got a lot of time for Wayne Smith who was in the All Black coaching team for many many years and when I was Director of Rugby at Northampton Saints, he was Head Coach and just a wonderful man. His people management, his leadership and his understanding of what matters in sport was absolutely right up there, hence the fact that he stayed coaching one of the world’s most successful sporting teams for so many years.

I: Most useless piece of advice that you’ve been given or given to somebody else?

R: Probably, and this takes me back, before the Pilkington Cup Final at Twickenham, Saints v Harlequins 1991, in front of a full Twickenham, we travelled down on the morning in the coach from Saints, I was a player there, and our coach insisted we all had an enormous English breakfast, which included sausages, bacon, the lot, because that would help us fuel up for the day and throughout the whole final, I just felt slightly nauseous.

I: Nauseous all the way through.

R: And it wasn’t nerves, it was definitely a dodgy breakfast.

I: I wonder whether this has anything to do with your current breakfast choice?

R: It maybe does, maybe that’s just stayed with me and we lost in extra time, so, yeah, I’m not bitter, but I think you’re right.

I: Greatest passion outside of sport?

R: I think, I’m a student of leadership and I’m very very passionate about it, it’s about interacting with people, but I think my greatest passion is time with my family and that sounds, yeah, but everyone always says that, but I just love it, it’s just…I have teenage daughters and they’re wonderful company, incredibly supportive wife, a couple of dogs that I enjoy walking and all of that now is a passion to me, whereas 20 years ago, I wouldn’t have even thought about that.

I: And last question, best performance enhancer?

R: Self-awareness.

I: Tell me more.

R: Anyone who has, I find high performers incredibly self-aware, because that’s the fuel of improvement, and if you’re self-aware, and you’re hungry and driven, wow, that’s perfect.

I: Well, thank you very much for talking with me today John, I really appreciate it.

R: It’s been my pleasure.

I: Thanks for listening, you can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to a questionofperformance.com.

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Ep 28. Ali Donnelly – “You work your life around your passion”

1st April 2018 by tammyparlour Leave a Comment

In episode 28 we talk with founder and editor of Scrumqueens.com Ali Donnelly.

Ali is also a monthly contributor to Rugby World Magazine and regularly speaks across media outlets about the game. The website was given a special award by the Rugby Writers Association for its contribution to the women’s game and Ali was last year named by Rugby World Magazine as one of the most influential people in rugby.

Away from Scrumqueens.com, Ali is the Deputy Spokesperson to the Prime Minister, balancing a high profile and busy day-job at Downing Street, with delivering quality content for the website, which she runs as a volunteer, and its social media feeds. She is also Head Coach for the Teddington Women’s Team.

Ali takes a broad view on what it is to grow the women’s game. She shares her insights, her determination and gives us a glimpse at what it really takes to start something from scratch.

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TX: 01.4.18 – Ep 28. Ali Donnelly – “You work your life around your passion”

HOST: TAMMY PARLOUR

I: Welcome to a Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views and what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way. Today’s interview is with the founder and editor of Scrum Queens, Ali Donnelly. Last year she was named as one of the most influential people in rugby. She’s also the deputy spokesperson for the Prime Minister and balances a high profile and busy day job at Downing Street with delivering quality content for this award winning rugby new service. Ali takes a broad view and what it is to grow the women’s game. She shares her insights, her determination and gives us a glimpse of what it really takes to start something from scratch. But first why rugby?

R: Well I started playing when I was 16 because…simply because I’d moved house and it was the nearest sporting field to me and I saw women playing and I thought that looked great fun. I was a GA player so I played Gaelic football and komogi and I was not that school fool but I was quite tough. So, I thought rugby would be good for me and yeah, like lots of people will tell you who’ve played rugby after one session, I was just hooked and I have been ever since as a fan, coach, writer, ex-player. So, yeah, it just really suited me.

I: You’ve set up Scrumqueens and which is the world’s leading independent and award winning women’s rugby website. I’m really fascinated to know where that came from.

R: So, I had moved to London from Ireland in 2007, and I had been a journalist in Ireland and then I’d moved to London and went to work in communications at the BBC after a little bit of journalism work, and I really missed writing and I was very passionate about women’s rugby. I was playing over here. I started playing at Wasp and then I went down to Teddington and I thought well the world cup is approaching and it’s in London where I’m now living. My partner owns a design agency which is very useful. So, they offered to build something and so in 2009 we set the website up. It launched some very little fanfare and the reason or intention was just to sort of see what the response would be like, write about the build up to the World Cup and go from there, and that’s how it started really. I just you know, put a request out for writers and a few volunteers came on board and you know, the day we launched we had like ten stories to launch the website with and it’s just grown and grown from there.

I: To think of what it is now, it’s international. You’ve got stories coming out all the time. How do you get from that starting point to where you are now?

R: Yeah. I mean, for me it was originally about simply shining a light on fixtures, games you know? There was no information. In 2009 when Scrum Queens began, you could barely find a match report. England were about the only team who consistently put out content about their women’s team, but there was nothing else really. You might find the odd fixture but you know, when we started I took all the mobile numbers of all the coaches, managers, anyone who’d give me a number in the international team and I would text them to find out scores at half time, full time, that sort of thing so we could tell people. But there was no information. There was just a gap and we start…I started out really just doing…writing match reports and you know, the odd preview of a tournament, that kind of thing and you know, as the game has changed and the profilers increased so too has you know, what we’ve been doing. There’s not really a need any more for you know, team announcements, things like that. I don’t really post those sorts of things because you can get them on the BBC now for example. So, it’s sort of grown as the games evolved, we’ve had to look at things a bit differently and in terms of how you know, people have…the traffic has grown and how the community has grown, you know I think it’s really important to be credible. You know, I’ve seen lots of women’s rugby websites come and go over the last ten years.

Many of them approach us first and try and get some ideas or try and work with us, but I think a lot of them have missed you know, either consistency so they start with great effect and then taper off as the reality of all of the hard work you have to put in sets in, or they just don’t have the credibility in the game. That takes a long time to build up. When I started Scrum Queens I had already been involved in women’s rugby for a long time. I’d been playing in Ireland. I was a voluntary PR of the Irish Women’s team when it was not with the RFU so I knew all of the players. I still know lots of them. I had written you know, hundreds of articles for newspapers in Ireland about women’s rugby, anyone who would take my buy line while I was a student and building up my own portfolio, I would send them something. So, I think I started with a bit of credibility and then it just built itself up along the way and those two things are really important because people can get fan’s content everywhere but when they want analysis or a view that might not be you know, immensely popular with officials and administrators, that I think they do come to Scrum Queens.

I: You’ve said that often sometimes when the hard work sets in, people start to have difficulties. What’s enabled you to stick at it because you’ve got a career. How is that possible to balance things?

R: That’s a great question, and I get asked that a lot but because I’m somebody who does balance my time well and can get a lot done in you know whatever free time I have, I can never answer that question because I don’t know what people are doing with their time to be honest. You know, people have different priorities but you know, I use the train to work, my 40 minute train ride to do some work. I’ll do a bit of work at lunchtime if I ever am lucky enough to take lunch break. I enjoy you know, when the baby’s gone to bed, I quite enjoy getting the laptop out and writing a couple of articles. You know, today I interviewed the Friends Scrum half when my daughter was having her nap. She woke up unhelpfully in the middle of the interview and had to do those things but you know, you can find the time but I think what’s important is you have the right people around you.

So, at Scrum Queens you know, the other main contributor to the website John Birch, has been just an enormous help and support to me. I mean he’s…he really is the other half of the website. You know, my wife’s design agency able to build it, able to you know, fix the technical problems that often you know, I come across and I have no idea what to do with and at work too, I have a great sort of team around me and I great support network to allow my career to be a success. So, I think you know, it’s about putting your…starting yourself with the right people you know, prioritising your time better. You know don’t get me wrong, if it comes to going for a run or keeping fit I’ll find no free time, but if it’s doing something that I’m passionate about, you can find the time. I mean I’m still coaching a women’s team as well and you know you just work your life around your passion I think, that makes you better at your job too and makes me a better mum I think as well. So, yeah you find the time if you want to.

I: Yeah. You told me offline that running Scrumqueens has helped your career. How so?

R: Yeah it definitely has. I mean as a journ…

I: But your career is very different to running Scrumqueens?

R: …yeah, well yes. I mean I work in the communications and I work as a spokesperson but so as a journalist you know, I was lucky with Scrum Queens with what I did because I had a background in writing, in web writing too and newspaper writing. I understood the media when I started the website so I was able to use all of my contacts to promote it and I understood social media and that really helped. But every single interview I have done in the UK since I set the website up has focused more on Scrum Queens than any other part of my career, and even you know, for the job I do now, you know as a spokesperson for the prime minister, you would imagine the interview would be heavily focused on. Lots of other things, and don’t get me wrong, was a long interview and we covered a lot of topics but they were very interested in Scrum Queens and I think it’s because people you know, people like the fact that you are self starting, that you are self motivating, that you can get on and do things and you know, I’m definitely a get on a do things kind of person, and I think for the jobs that I do which are you know, working in high profile pressurised, press office environments, that’s the kind of attribute that really can be an asset that you see a problem you fix it, get it done and you just get on and deliver and I think also the fact that I’ve been able to show that I’ve done something over a long period of time, I take a lot of pride in it and you know, it’s been successful, I think that’s pretty appealing to employers.

I: Your motivation and passion for it comes…just comes running off you. I want to go to the dark side. There has to have been times through since 2009, since setting it up to now that it hasn’t gone the right way. That you’ve had challenges, that your motivation has been sort of lacking a little bit surely?

R: Yes. I mean I think the times it hasn’t gone as well might be when…so all are volunteers at Scrum Queens and I made a conscious choice to not move beyond that partly because that is you know, something that I feel might compromise what we’re doing. Also it’s not my forte you know, commercialising you know, anything. So, that means that we were allowing to volunteers and sometimes you know, we get very keen volunteers who promise the world and then it all falls away. So, that can be disappointing when you suddenly have a massive gap in your content. But actually I don’t think I’ve dipped too much in terms of motivation and that’s also because…because I do to my own time, and there’s no-one telling me I need to put X Y and Z up, I can take a break. I mean last week between the rest week and the Six Nations, I mean John posted three or four articles about the European Tournament but I didn’t post anything, and so I had almost three or four days of not thinking about not doing anything and the next couple of days you know, interviewing two England players tomorrow. I’m doing another email interview as well with somebody at Q&A so it will crank up again next to the tournament but you know, I can step away from it when I want to and that’s a really nice thing. And then you know, at a World Cup, at a Six Nations we’ll do lots and lots more. So, yeah I haven’t…it’s going to be ten years next year. I probably do need to start thinking about what I’m going to do with it but I’ve never thought oh I can’t be bothered with this you know, because there’s always something new. So, we re-launched the website two years ago and it looks completely different there. We need to do it again because technology changes. You know, we’re using social media feeds. We never used to use so you know, there’s always something that makes it interesting and keeps your motivation high I think.

I: You’re…am I right in thinking your team of writers is internationally spread?

R: Yeah. I mean team is a big word. I mean John Birch and I write the bulk of the content and then we have contributions from around the world, and…

I: So, how does that come out? How do you go about getting the best performance out of people? How…?

R: …yeah I mean people are motivated by saying their name and you know, not in prints but online as well and you know, I think we…the contributions that we do have are very knowledgeable at their areas. So, we have someone who often contributes stories about South American rugby which is not something that we know a lot about, and that requires lots of editing because English is not his first language but he has a great depth of knowledge and we only ask him you know, very rarely to do something and when he does, it’s very good and we’re not sort of overly reliant on the others. You know, players often write for us, coaches have written for us and I think now that the website’s been on a long time, I think people want to be part of it and you know, when I say to a French player who doesn’t speak very much English and can’t really read the website, will you do an interview with Scrum Queens? They say “ah yes, Scrum Queens of course,” you know, and I think the other thing of course is Twitter has been an enormous help to us with terms of keeping our community together because you know, people can see the interactions that we have with fans and with you know, top players and coaches and that makes them interested in being part of what we’re doing.

I: I have a question written down here that says why is Scrum Queens still standing when others have folded, and it seems sort of ridiculous to ask that question now because I just listened to you and it’s sort of well why wouldn’t it still be standing up? Is there any…do you have any insight into why you have succeeded and others haven’t or is it just that determination and just the decision of it’s going.

R: I think you know, I mentioned credibility. That’s really important you know, and that line between being a fan and actually being a reporter which I guess is what we are at Scrum Queens is important and I think we’ve had a lot of people have come into the space and they’ve been fans and I often use the phrase you know, “another cheerleader with a tight brassier,” and that you know, we’ve had a lot of those very well meaning motivated people but in the end they wouldn’t get the sort of traffic because you know, people are interested in reading a bit more about it, and I think the other things would be consistency. You know, Scrum Queens has never switched itself off for six months you know? There’s always a story every week that’s of interest. It might not be you know, it might not be getting 20/30,000 hits. It might get 3/4,000 hits but it doesn’t matter because we’ll, you know, we keep chugging out stories and interviews and I think the other thing that we’ve really tried to do is not be…as you know, I’ve seen a huge change in the coverage of women’s rugby since we’ve started. I mean in ’09 nobody was writing about women’s rugby.

They really weren’t. I mean Stephen Jones at Sunday Times would disagree because he did a couple of world cups and so on but there was nobody else really, and now you know, The Guardian had a big piece in the [unclear 16.18] yesterday, The Times are interviewing players, etcetera, so, we’ve had to change to and the one thing that I think we’ve been really consistent on that has helped us stick around is we never really focused on success so we didn’t just focus on England or New Zealand. You know, we will give as much attention to the Finnish Women’s rugby team if they help us with the information. You know, we’ll spend just as much time writing an article about them or interviewing one of their players that might get 500 hits all from Finland but those 500 people have never read about their team anywhere else before. So, we’ve really felt it’s important to keep shining a light in parts of the game that just don’t get coverage because that’s what we were doing in ’09 with the big teams when nobody else was covering them and now they’re getting that profile and coverage and I feel like you know Scrum Queens is one of the only places that will cover every you know tier four and five competitions or quite obscure countries in Africa who might have a team and have played one match. We will write about them when nobody else will so, I think that’s helped us because people can see that we’re in it for the right reasons. You know, we’re not just here to cover England or Ireland for me who’s the team that I would know the most about. We’re actually in it because we want to promote women’s rugby. It doesn’t really matter who it is and over ten years I think, you know, people will buy into that because they appreciate you’re doing it.

I: What you’re talking is the fans, do you have any insight from your perspective on what people…why people are interested in women’s rugby?

R: Yeah I mean I think you know, with coverage obviously it becomes more profile and then that generates interest and there’s no doubt since the women’s game started signing broadcast deals and started you know, getting games on the BBC red button here in the UK, on Sky Sports around the world and invested in live streaming. So, live streaming’s been a huge innovation in the women’s game in recent years and most of the games you can watch now. The top games are online and you know, with all of that comes renewed interest. I think sevens you know, has been a huge boost for in generating interest in women’s rugby and bringing more fans to the game. You know the Olympic final was just you know, an amazing thing to see. Something I never thought I would see in my lifetime. I mean back when we started, I mean that might be a bit of an exaggeration but back when we started you know, they had not…you know, world rugby were not successful in their bid to part of the Olympics because they did not have enough equality between men’s and women’s rugby basically, and you know, I kind of thought it would fall by the wayside then but you know, they have invested and we now have professional rugby women players and certainly I didn’t think I’d see that for 20/30 years so all of that has helped to generate interest and spectators but you know, there’s still an awful long way to go you know…?

I: What would you like to see? What changes would you like to see?

R: In general in women’s rugby?

I: Hmmm.

R: Oh so many. How long have you got? I really sent a list of ways the Six Nations could be better to some of the Six Nations officials. I don’t know if they’re going to read it but…

I: You haven’t got a response yet?

R: …no, I’ve had a very nice thank you, and these are very interesting. I think you know, one of the issues…I mean there’s a big debate in the women’s game about 15s and sevens and you know, this sort of debate in cricket say, you know, some time back and you know, no-one has really worked out the right formula yet, whether to go all out and warn all [unclear 19.47] etcetera. So, but I think for me 15s is still the game and I love 15s. I would rather watch you know, a nil or you know, mod fest than watch SMs tournament which is a terrible thing to say and I think sevens is great but it’s not my type of you know, entertainment. I’d much rather watch 15s but the 15s game is still where fans…it’s still where players play. Most players take the game up to 15s around sort of sevens team. They just join and play. If you look at the world cup in Ireland last year and the one in Paris before that, the numbers of fans that turned out, the fans that watched on broadcast etcetera, you know, far surpasses anything. The sevens game is able to achieve right there and so there is a huge market in test 15s and then 15s are beaten. You know, one I would really like to see is beyond the Six Nations and the World Cup you know, more tier two competitions. You know, we saw Spain playing last week in the European Championships and they you know, all avenues are blocked off for them in terms of development because there’s no tier two European competition of any value.

You know they’re way too good for all of the other teams and the European competition that they’re currently in, they never get to play the Six Nations teams really apart from the odd friendly and you know, they’re trying to build up for World Cup on that basis. So, I think I would love to see more investment in tier two 15s and all of the investment we’re seeing at the moment has gone into sevens. So, I’d like to see that. More countries taking responsibility of their domestic game and getting hold of it and the less of a top down approach which has served countries like Ireland very well with small player base, investing a lot of time and energy in their you know, top 20 players but now they’ve come out with a disappointing world cup figure and have to rethink that because that’s as far as I’ve moved on you know. So, I I’d like to see a bit more just in the next tier down and in the 15s, and just a realisation actually the market for a 15s is huge. You know, France will probably have 10,000 people at this game between themselves and England this weekend, and you know, that’s incredible. That’s their fans who are just coming out to watch women’s rugby. So, yeah, I mean the more that we can invest in 15s I think the better because sevens is on a roll and will continue to attract cash and sponsors eventually, and…but that 15s game needs a bit of a G up I think.

I: Do you see sport as political?

R: Definitely.

I: Tell me a little bit about that.

R: You know, I think it’s very noble when people say that they think the two shouldn’t mix but actually it’s not reality. You know, thinking about women’s sports, you know, every time a woman is not allowed into a stadium, cannot play this…is banned from playing a sport and that’s political. You know, we saw the Winter Olympics recently and how politics in sports cross over each other and you know, it can be a really good thing but they’re certainly not separate and anyone who thinks, they are wrong.

I: I’m just going to ask you a question that I’m asking everybody and that’s about success because this podcast is about performance and different people’s views on success. What’s success for you personally?

R: Oh! I should’ve thought about this before I came in. Success for me is doing what I do to a really high standard and being happy with it. I have very high expectations of people around me because I have high expectations of myself and you know I find in my work environment for example, you know I manage a big team in Downing Street in a very young, ambitious, high achieving people who you know, wouldn’t be there otherwise, and you know, for me it’s vital that I set the standard and my work quality is high because only then can I expect that from them and when those two things are working, that’s success to me, and Scrum Queens to its own extent is the same. You know, I expect my interviews and my research to be good and the content needs to be good and I think you can bring others along with you if they see that you were setting the standard, if that makes sense?

I: Totally. I’m just going to end up with some quick fire questions. What did you eat for breakfast?

R: Toast and banana.

I: Favourite piece of kit?

R: Ooh! That’s a good question. As a coach I really like…so there’s a rugby pad you can get where you attach it to your back and it means that players can jump up and you can kick the ball and they can have a soft landing. We have one of them at my club and there’s a constant scrap before training between all the teams to get it. I quite like it.

I: A sporting hero?

R: Probably Sonny O’Sullivan who is an athlete from Cork where I’m from. She’s from about three miles up the road from me.

I: And why her?

R: Because she inspired everyone in Ireland when we were not very well known for our prowess in athletics and she’s the first person I remember coming inside from playing to watch on the telly. I mean she was local to me too which made a difference because you’d occasionally see her and she felt like someone I could talk to if I passed her on the street. I mean she didn’t feel like a celebrity but I think that first kind of memory of watching someone do really well I mean for your country, and everybody watching the telly you know, man, woman, child. Yeah she was amazing. She was such an Irish icon.

I: Most useless piece of advice that you’ve either been given or given to someone else?

R: I…I’m going to say a really cliché thing here and say that all advice whether bad or good is useful because sometimes bad advice reminds you, you know, what not to do. I mean when I left my last job, so I used to work for another government department before I came to Downing Street, you know, people told me I was mad to go and work there. Why would you want to go and work in Downing Street? You will have no quality of life. People who work there are really tough and you know, all the rest of it, and that was terrible advice because it’s the best job I’ve ever had and yes it’s really hard and yes it’s challenging and there are some really rough days in there. You know, last summer we…I worked you know, five, six weekends in a row around some really awful tragedies you know? We had Grenfell, we had terror attacks and you know, at the same time there was you know, domestic issues and we were talking about Europe and they’re really tough but if I’d taken the advice of some really important senior people around me in other parts of government, God! What and idiot I would’ve been but you know, in hindsight I can see why they said that but you have trust your gut. You have to trust your instinct and my instinct was there’s a big right yeah.

I: Greatest passion outside of sport?

R: I mean now I would say my daughter. For sure she’s just amazing, fun, energetic girl but probably you know, probably this is really naff but probably reading the newspaper. I love newspapers. I love the smell of them. I love the feel of them. I buy one every day…

I: Which section do you read?

R: …I always read sport first obviously but I…I mean I read the news for my job to be fair, but I’m a big fan of the comment pieces and I read editorials and there are certain commentators I really like, certain commentators I hate. I always read the ones I hate too because I feel it’s very important to understand how the people are feeling, but yeah reading newspapers. There’s nothing like a Saturday morning if I have a quiet time just to you know, I won’t tell you my favourite newspaper but to read the newspaper with a coffee…

I: Maybe when we’re offline…

R: …yeah, yeah.

I: …best performance and answer?

R: …ooh! I should have thought about this because you did mention some of these to me. I think it’s playing for your team mates and I know that’s probably a different answer to others you were given but…

I: I like to put down something.

R: …yeah I mean as a coach of adult women, you know, ages from sort of 18 to 36…actually there’s a 40 year old I coach, so there’s a real span of ages. It doesn’t really matter when they’re on the field. You know, they you know for example we played top of the league last week and we’re not having a great season, and you know, we really talked about doing for each other and we beat them right? And it was a real shock to everyone in the league not least to ourselves to be honest, but they weren’t better than the other team on paper or anything but God! The will to do it for each other and I think that can add you know, 20 to 30% to your performance. You know, maybe I’m giving you too long answer here but being Irish I think we as a nation of athletes and you know sports teams and so on, we really derive a lot of motivation and passion from togetherness, and I think that’s such an enhancer. You know, when Ireland play England you know, when Ireland played England at Crow Park and that was a really for the first time such an historic day because of everything that ground represents in Irish history. You know, grown men were just balling, crying watching the thing and of course we won right? We had to win that match but I’d say emotion and playing for each other carried them 30/40% of the way and that’s a very Irish thing, and I think it’s such an enhacer if you’re out there and you’re like not that sure but you know you’ve got your mates beside you. I think that can really boost you up.

I: Well it’s been brilliant talking to you Ali. Thank you very much.

R: Thank you.

I: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionandperformance.com

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Ep 27. Gavin Makel – the man behind the rise of Man City Women

1st March 2018 by tammyparlour Leave a Comment

In episode 27 we talk with the Head of Women’s Football at Manchester City, Gavin Makel. Manchester City are trailblazers for the women’s game with successes both on and off the pitch. They have also recently launched a new club wide campaign focused on promoting women’s football.

We discuss the growth of the game, risk taking, authenticity, and the importance of having a coherent vision that fuels performance.

Gavin’s involvement in professional football goes back over ten years when he worked within the football operation of the Manchester City’s community foundation. In his current role as Head of Women’s Football at Manchester City he is responsible for the business operation of the organisation which encompasses player recruitment, marketing, commercial, finance management and match day operations. He sits on the European Club Association Women’s Football Committee Bureau and is currently undertaking a Masters in Sports Directorship at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Commenting on the women’s team set up, Gavin has stated:
‘We are here to challenge and change the perception of women’s football. We are professionalising a sport which traditionally hasn’t received the support or resource it has deserved’.

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TX: 01.3.18 – Ep 27. Gavin Makel – the man behind the rise of Man City Women

HOST: TAMMY PARLOUR

T: Welcome to a Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views and what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

G: So my name is Gavin Makel, I’m the head of women’s football here at Manchester City Football Club. Been in this role for five years now, since we re-launched Manchester City Women and brought them in-house and made them part and parcel of the overall business of the football club, which has been an incredible journey and one which I’m very proud of.

T: Things have changed quite a lot over the five years, which we’ll get into a little bit more as we go through. But I suppose first I’m interested to know why women’s football?

G: Well, I’ve been at the club 10 years now and in different roles throughout my time here. Initially started within our community foundation, taking up roles where obviously I was going out and doing a lot of outreach work. And that’s something that the club’s really passionate about and continues to be very passionate about. And that’s around football for all whether, you know, giving young people, male, female, those with disabilities, the opportunities to play the game. And then I was approached by the club through Brian Marwood, to go along to a meeting with himself and the FA around putting a team into the room simply. And it came as a bit of a surprise to me because there was a lot of areas with what the role encompasses that I’d never experienced previously. I’d never dealt with a player agent before. I’d never necessarily done a commercial strategy before because my roles had always been very much on the ground, if you like, project managing soccer schools and international soccer schools with the club etc. But I jumped at the opportunity because I saw where the women’s game was going off the back of the Olympics in 2012 obviously as well. And it was a blank sheet of paper that I could really get my teeth into and hopefully drive on the success.

T: You started at a very, very exciting time. And Man City has been incredibly successful over that time and is really seen as the team to beat. You’ve got the Continental Cup final coming up in March. You have just got through to the FA quarter finals. I suppose I’m interested in for a sport to be high performing like Man City Women are, what do you feel are the key ingredients that are needed?

G: I think for any high performance environment there’s a few elements. And I think first and foremost you need a vision. You need a real strong vision and objectives. And you set those objectives out right from the start. And then you’ve got to get people who are going to go along on that journey to create that vision with you. And I think we’ve managed to have that. And that was one of the things that we put in place right at the beginning, our challenge then five years ago when we re-launched was a change of name from Manchester City Ladies to Manchester City Women, was to challenge the perception of what is women’s football. And that still continues today in all aspects, whether it’s the product on the pitch, whether it’s what we do on social media, it’s what we do from a marketing perspective. So that was one of the kind of the key drivers for me, and creating a culture and an environment where everyone’s really working towards that vision is really key. And I think also you’ve got to give people, you’ve got to give people autonomy as well.

So I’m not the type of manager who with members of my staff, I’m not the type of person who will look over their shoulders. There’s got to be an element of trust. And I think that comes right the way down through the club, with my line manager, Oman Berrada who’s the CEO at the club, and Brian Marwood previously. You know, they’re very comfortable at letting you grow and take your own risks as long as you learn from them, you take risks. And I think we’ve done that quite a lot. And you know, obviously I’d like to say most of them have been really successful. But as I say, it doesn’t matter if those risks don’t come off.

T: What would you say are one of the sort of big risks that you have taken?

G: Well, I think we’ve taken one recently really with the launch of Same City, Same Passion, in terms of merging our social media channels. That was a bit of a risk for us because the women’s team social media platforms were really, really strong. We had 4.6 million followers on our Facebook page, which was more than 13 men’s Premier League Facebook pages. So for us to then say, “Right, that’s not happening anymore, but we’re going to move along into the parent channel”, if you like. That was a big risk for us to take. And I think it’s been well received as we did, we obviously aligned it with the launch of that campaign. And it continues to. And there was a lot of deliberation around it. And to begin with, I’ll be honest, I was a bit…I wasn’t all for it, because I did see the risk in it. But I definitely think from now we’ve seen the benefits out of it, because ultimately we’ve now been able to reach 10 times the amount of people that we ever could on the women’s channels through communication and content and engaging with fans through our parent club social media channel. So that was one.

I think changing the name from City Ladies to City Women could have been a bit of a risk. But that again went down really well because we just knew that we wanted to promote our players as strong athletic women, because that’s what they are. We don’t call it the gentlemen’s game I always say, so why should we call it the ladies game? It’s no different for us. So there’s been plenty, to be honest. And we’ll continue to do that because this club’s about pushing boundaries. It’s about innovation. It’s about getting people excited. It’s about showing some passion. And you can’t do that without taking those risks. And it’s nice to work in an environment where that’s, you know, that’s kind of expected as well.

T: You must have seen loads of changes over the past sort of 10 years that you’ve been with Man City. What do you think have been some of the key milestone moments that you have experienced?

G: Well, there’s been quite a few to be fair. I mean I remember when I joined; I joined the football club probably maybe six months before the takeover happened. And obviously we’re coming up to the 10 year anniversary of Sheikh Mansour’s ownership in ADUG. And I was actually at a funeral that day and there was someone from the community, phoned me, a friend of mine and he said, “You’re never going to guess what’s happened. We’ve just been bought out by Abu Dhabi and we’ve signed Robinho.” I was kind of, “You do know I’m at a funeral, don’t you? This is not a joking matter.” But obviously it was true. And then ever since that first day, I mean I remember that weekend after we played Chelsea, I think, the men’s team played Chelsea and Robinho’s debut. And I’m pretty sure he scored in that game as well. And there was just a whole sense of optimism throughout the whole football club. And from that day on every single day there was changes right the way through the club, whether it be in personnel, whether it be the look and feel of club. There was a direction and there was real hunger to make this one of the most successful football clubs in world football.

T: It’s interesting, you talk about change, sometimes change can be quite disturbing and quite sort of difficult to go through. But the way I hear you describe it, it seems empowering and exciting.

G: Yeah, it was. And don’t get me wrong, there would have been…change can be scary for some people, 100%. But it’s how you as an individual, how you embrace that. Because the actions and the words that were coming out at the time about, “This is what we’re going to do. This is what’s going to happen.” It was exciting and you couldn’t help but be excited by it. Then came City Football Academy here on the campus which I know you’ve been to. And that opened up and you’re suddenly put in an environment where you’re living and breathing football on a daily basis with everyone around you that can ultimately get you to the top of your game. And again, that’s one thing about here, you can either…we often say, you know, I often speak to people in turn and we often say, “This place can either make or break you in many ways.” Because it can break you in the sense that you can quite easily take your foot off the pedal. But because you’ve got everything that you could possibly need to be the best version of yourself. Or it can drive you on to be even better. And that’s what it does here. And that’s something that I live by day in, day out. I drive in every morning and I can honestly say in the 10 years that I’ve been at the club there’s not been one day where I’ve gone, “I’ve got to go to work today.” It’s an unbelievable place to be.

T: It is an amazing campus. And the success that Man City and you as well has been quite phenomenal. And I suppose with success comes a degree of responsibility. Do you feel a responsibility?

G: Yes, first and foremost we have a responsibility to the game. We have a responsibility that we want to drive interest. We want to drive visibility. In the women’s game we all know that it suffered for many years of lack of resources, lack of funding, lack of investment, lack of media interest. And we take that on our shoulders as well, not us alone, by any stretches, obviously other clubs and national associations etc have to come along on that journey with us. But yeah, we do have that responsibility on us, and providing a platform for the next generation of young girls to put on a pair of football boots or pick up a ball and play the game ultimately. Because that’s the only way we’re going to get the game growing at a faster rate, although it’s growing at a considerably quick rate.

T: I suppose I’m interested to know and to understand well, why more support and resources are starting to go into the game, why is that?

G: I think other clubs and people have recognised the opportunity. They see the game that is growing. But I think also there’s this piece around that football’s maybe not what it used to be in terms of the target demographic of audience, we go back years and years. And I grew up in the 80s going to St James Park up in Newcastle. And it was predominantly middle aged white men that were at the game, working class. And the game’s not necessarily like that anymore. It’s a much wider demographic of people. And I think maybe that stems a lot of peoples’ interest as well. And so it’s been able to reach out to different audiences. But also I think for us it aligns with our values. This is who we are as a football club. And Manchester City, I spoke about at the beginning, my work at the Community Foundation, we were football for all. And that was the basis of Manchester City being founded back in the late 1800s was to create something, an environment and a space for young people, men and women to play the game or spectate and watch the game, get involved in any area. And that’s no different for us. So that’s really, really important. So it’s go to align with your values. And I think if you’re going to do it and you’re going to embrace the women’s game within a club, you have to do it in an authentic way. And that’s one of the big things that I’m very, very proud of, because I think we have done it very authentically, because we are authentic, because that’s what we believe in and that’s what we value.

T: You’ve just spoken a bit just then about spectatorship. And in many ways understanding spectatorship is almost the next frontier for women’s sport, for women’s football. Can you relate to that?

G: Yeah, of course, it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge for all. And you know one of the biggest frustrations for me in some ways is that, you know, you obviously see when England, whether it was in the World Cup in 2015 or the Euros last summer, fantastic TV audiences and spectatorship. And the way that the whole country got behind the team, whether it was from a media interest. And then it comes down to the domestic game at club level and it doesn’t necessarily fall through. And I think you see that, you see that in other women’s sports as well, you know, like the hockey, obviously they were really successful in Rio a couple of years ago. But do we hear about women’s hockey outside of those windows? We’ve seen, you know, what’s going on now in South Korea with, you know, Lizzy Yarnold with a double gold now. Will we ever hear about the skeleton until another four years? So there’s this piece about making sure that we continue on this legacy and continuity.

And we keep on talking about women’s sport and the role models that are in there because we do need strong role models from the sports, like Lizzy Yarnold, like the Jessie [unclear – 0:14:56] and like the Steph Orton’s of the world. But for me as well within the women’s game we need to make sure that we’re not just targeting our marketing and our match day experience and everything that comes with that just for young girls and women. Because it’s much broader than that, there’s a lot more interest. We know there’s a lot more interest in women’s sport than it just being for young girls and women. If we’re ever going to grow it to where we want it to be, we need, we need to be able to create those different match day experiences, target and communicate with different types of people in different ways.

T: Which new change or development do you find most exciting when you’re looking at your role?

G: It changes on a daily basis. It changes on an hourly basis, to be honest. I mean if I look back on the 2014 Continental Cup final when we beat Arsenal at Adams Park, and actually it’s the exact re-run of that game at the same venue in a couple of weeks time. If I look back at what we had then in terms of the players that we had, we definitely didn’t have the best team by a long stretch. But we had honest players. We had young players, Keira Walsh was in that squad. She was only 16/17 at the time. And now she’s just been called again to SheBelieves Cup, which is fantastic. I think for me it’s about how far can we push it? How far can we grow? We’ve now got a girl’s academy which is incredibly exciting and that’s one thing for me, when I look at some of our under 12s and our under 14s, and there’s some major talent in those age groups, to think, right, in four or five years’ time when, you know, Jill Scott and Karen Bardsley decide that they need to stop playing, we’ve got a strong succession of young hungry talent coming through the system. And that’s one area for me that I’m really focused on at the moment because it’s vitally important that we have that succession plan for the future.

T: This whole podcast is about different peoples’ views on success, different views on performance as well. So I suppose I’d like to ask you the same question that I’ve asked everybody else and that is what does success mean for you personally?

G: For me, if I was to ever leave the football club or leave the role that I’m currently doing, if I can at least look back on what I’ve achieved and what I’ve put in and the effort that I’ve put in and have no regrets. I think that’s a kind of level of success for me personally. It’s often said, isn’t it, when players or any athletes, when they go into a final and they say, “Don’t leave anything out there. Make sure that you put everything in. And that you have no regrets.” I think that for me personally is something that I would take with me as that level of success. But also knowing that I’ve made an impact and helped more than anything, and I do believe I think we have helped. And I say we there because I think that’s really important. You asked me the question about success for me, but it can’t be done without good people in and around you as well. It’s impossible. And that’s something that Nick and I speak about, Nick Cushing, the manager of the women’s team, when we bring in players they have to be at the right personality. That’s not to say that they’re bad people, by the way, just to clarify that. But they have to have, if they want to come on the journey with us, they embrace our vision of how we want to perceive the women’s game, how we want to grow it. And it’s the same with the other staff members, whether you’re in the marketing team or whether you’re in our commercial sales team, wherever it might be. So that’s important to me as well. So I guess there’s a bit of a legacy piece there, if that all makes sense.

T: Absolutely. Well, just to round up with some quick fire questions. What did you eat for breakfast?

G: Scrambled eggs on toast.

T: Favourite piece of kit?

G: Sports kit I’m assuming you mean?

T: However you want to define that.

G: Well, I do have, I mentioned before that I grew up in Newcastle, around Newcastle. So I do have Paul Gascoigne’s shirt, when he played for Newcastle back in 1980, you’re testing me; I think it was around 87, 88. So I do have that which I cherish quite a lot.

T: Well, that leads onto a sporting hero.

G: Growing up, it would have been on the terraces of St James, it would have been Gazza.

T: And why?

G: I think, you know, he captured the hearts of many people, didn’t he? And particularly in 1990, in the Italian 90 watching the West Germany game in the semi-final, I was a 10 year old then and he was obviously local to me. And I was fortunate enough, because my brother played for Newcastle right away until he was 21 before moved to Blackburn. And I was fortunate enough to see Gazza training etc. So he was a fantastic player, first and foremost. But then from football, there’s obviously also Andre Agassi who I looked up to quite a lot because tennis was a big sport that I was involved in as well when I was a kid.

T: Most useless piece of advice you have given or given to someone else?

G: You’d ask to have my [unclear speech – 0:20:56] advice I’ve given. You know what, I was thinking about this the other day and I don’t think there’s any one bit, there’s never a bad bit of advice. Someone once said to me, there’s never a bad bit of advice, no matter, it might seem wrong or might seem like a bad piece of advice at the time. But take it onboard because you never know when you might need it or might use it in the future. So that lives with me quite a lot.

T: Greatest passion outside of sport?

G: Music actually.

T: Do you play something?

G: I do, I play guitar.

T: And last one, best performance enhancer?

G: Well, I’d have to say music, wouldn’t I as well, in many ways? It’s like the Rocky movies, as soon as that music comes on you want to go and fight 12 rounds with Apollo Creed or something. But I mean realistically it’s probably making sure, again, just bringing it back to what I’ve discussed. I think you’re on the right page and the right vision with other people around you who embrace that as well, I think that can give you that extra 1% that takes you to the next level and ultimately gets what you set out to desire.

T: Well, thank you very much, Gavin, it’s been brilliant talking with you today.

G: You’re welcome, thanks very much.

T: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook. And also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionofperformance.com.

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Ep26. Tamsin Greenway – the playmaker on and off the court

1st February 2018 by tammyparlour Leave a Comment

In episode 26 we talk with a netball superstar, Tamsin Greenway. As a former England international, a former England coach, a Sky Sports pundit and now Director of Wasps Netball, she has a unique insight into the whole sporting system.

We discuss the challenges and rewards of being an England player and then coach, how she is building Wasps Netball from the ground up, and the impact Sky Sports broadcasting is having on the sport.

Tamsin Greenway is a former England international netball player, former England coach and now Director of Wasps Netball. Greenway guided Wasps Netball to the Vitality Netball Superleague title in the club’s inaugural season – her third consecutive title after back-to-back victories with Surrey Storm.

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TX: 01.2.18 – Ep 26. Tamsin Greenway – the playmaker on and off the court

HOST: TAMMY PARLOUR

T: Welcome to a Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views and what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

TP: Today I’m talking with Tamsin Greenway. Now if you know anything about netball you’ll know who Tamsin is. She’s an absolute legend, a real superstar in the sport. I’ve met Tamsin on a few occasions now and I’m consistently struck by her drive. She has a genuine appetite to learn and to influence and a real ambition and determination to shape her sport. As a former England international, a former England coach, a Sky Sports pundit and now director of Wasps Netball, Tamsin also has a unique insight into the whole sporting system. We start the interview reflecting on her time on the court. I ask her has she always known she was good?

TG: Um, mm, yeah, no. I knew I was, I was always very sporty and netball was always my passion. At age ten I think I came home from my first ever session and got back to my mum and said, “I know what I’m gonna be now. I’m gonna be a netball player for England,” and she went, “Okay, we’ll see.” But it was kind of always something I wanted to do.

TP: What was it about that session?

TG: You know what? It’s bizarre because when I think back at it now and I always say to my mum, why the hell didn’t you put me into tennis or golf or something where I could have made some money or I could have retired rich. No, I love team sports so I played all sports anyway. First passion was football, ‘cause I was surrounded by boys. But I still remember that session. I remember the white board and us learning about the positions. I just loved being part of the team and I was a showy little goal attack that would shoot from anywhere. And I just, yeah, I guess I liked the whole social side of it as well and the fact that you could, yeah, you were playing with loads of other people. So I always knew netball was the way forward and I kind of got to an age at fifteen, sixteen where I knew I was probably better than others. I could hold the team together; I could make the team win. So yeah, I kind of knew I was there. I didn’t know whether I could make it all the way but I had a massive determination to give it a go.

TP: So much as changed in netball since you came onto the international stage, and I believe that was 2005.

TG: Yeah.

TP: From the kit to the audiences, Sky’s involvement. What change do you find most exciting?

TG: Just the engagement with youngsters I guess, just that passion. I came home and said I wanted for England. I had no idea what that meant or what it was or even if it was possible, whether it was a way of life. And I think now the players having the opportunity, the girls seeing that there’s a different way, and even not to the elite level, but just the whole club part, the social part, the fun element. I think there’s so much more talk about netball now. It used to be so isolated; it’s been so nice to bring lots of people into it from all different parts of life really, and I think that’s probably excited me the most that there’s so much interest in it now, and in women’s sport, that people talk about it a lot more.

TP: You said in an article that I read yesterday actually that after seven incredible seasons at Surrey… I’ll start this again. After seven incredible seasons at Surrey Storm, I feel now is the right time for me to take on a new challenge. I’m interested about what makes a right time. How do you know to stop something and go onto something else?

TG: I probably got quite stale with certain things. I’d done things for such a long time, I could go to Surrey Storm with my eyes closed, you know. I’d played there, I’d coached there, I knew the ins and outs of everything and I didn’t think I could take it any further. You know, we made five grand finals in seven seasons, we’d won back to back titles and I couldn’t push it any more. Like there was nothing more to give I guess and that’s I think for me, and I know that as a person that I’m very, once I get to that stage I know that I need to go and do something else and find something else to do, which it has its pros and cons I guess. But yeah, I felt I couldn’t give any more to it than I’d already given and it was fresh for someone else to take on.

TP: Well I’m particularly interested in your current challenge. You’re director of Wasps. What does that involve?

TG: Everything. When I first joined it was mad because Wasps took it on, who have been absolutely fantastic, but they knew very limited about netball. So I mean I was getting asked questions at the start about how sprung the court needed to be and the dimensions and stuff. That’s what Google’s for, guys. But yeah, it’s kind of moulded into coach, overseeing all the community programmes, overseeing all the junior academies, and then being a sounding board for everything else. We’re great ‘cause we have a PR team, we have a ticketing team, we have all the guys there that are very involved and love it, but yeah more sort of advice of what netball looks like and how it should move forward.

TP: Talk about the court, you have literally built this from the ground up. Daunting or just absolutely invigorating?

TG: I guess looking back at it, it was probably quite daunting. I remember taking it on thinking this is brilliant, it’s my dream job. I walked into a boardroom full of lots of important people and they sold me the dream and I did not play it cool. I put my head on the table and went, “This is my dream job, okay, I’m here.” Walked into it and then thought, oh God, we don’t have anything. We didn’t have anything. We didn’t have a team, we didn’t have the back room staff, we didn’t have anything. So kind of the enormity hit home about a month after taking on the gig. But it kind of all just fell into place. It was one big roller coaster really. Like I don’t think I’d have changed it. I’ve almost found this season harder because last season you were just thrown into it, dropped in at the deep end and it was like right, sink or swim. This season has probably been more difficult because I’ve actually now got to plan things and last year it was just get on there, get a team together, try and win, which we ended up doing which doesn’t happen very often.

TP: But now I imagine you feel like you need to win again and again and each time get that little bit…

TG: I was having this conversation about coaching the other day actually, because I don’t… the pressure never stops, it never changes. So we won and the grand final was amazing for about three hours afterwards, and we had a great night out. And the next morning I’m going, okay, what does the team look like next year. Who’s gonna sign other players? What are the other teams gonna look like? How are we gonna win it again? And I kind of get annoyed at myself for having that part of me because it would be really nice sometimes just to sit back and go, wow, look what we did, and instead it was, right, how are we gonna build, what next.

TP: You’re in charge of player recruitment. When you’re trying to build a team, what ingredients do you look for?

TG: It has to be the right mix, so that’s not only the performance side. The performance side to me is the easy bit. I’ve got a style of play, how I want to play netball, so I have an idea of the shooter, the goal attack, what they kind of mix, and that’s easy for me to spot. The culture side is probably the most important part of anything. A winning team has the best team environment and different mixes of personalities and people can really disrupt that quite quickly. So I’m all about what they’re gonna bring to the team as a person. And actually if you know my team we’re all kind of odd bods in a weird way, but they’ve all got the same sort of general outlook, morals, that kind of thing and that makes a huge difference especially when you’re under pressure.

TP: To be the best team though, you have to get the best out of all your people. Any tips?

TG: Honesty, and that’s probably the biggest thing that I’ve had from being a player and being coached by lots of different people. They’re the most difficult conversations to have and it’s probably the hardest thing that I found becoming a coach, that those chats are awful to have sometimes, but you’re talking to grown ups who, you know, who want to achieve and want to do something and actually there’s no point fobbing them off. So how honest you can be with people at the start from everything from how much they’re gonna play to what they’re bringing or even if it’s just difficult conversations about what’s going on in life, it’s really important that you can have those chats with people. They don’t always like what you say and they sometimes don’t always hear what you’re saying, but at least you give it a go.

TP: Do you think having been an athlete and then a coach gives you that edge?

TG: I think it’s given me a style of how I want to have my team. It wouldn’t work for everybody and that’s what I say about the culture’s really important, ‘cause actually that way is not the best way for everyone. I’ve had lots of coaches that their way to fire you up is to shout at you, to basically tell you you’re rubbish when you want to be better. I’ve also had coaches that have told you brilliant. Each way is different for people, but I think it’s at least given me an angle that I’ve gone, right, this is how I want to coach the players, and everyone can buy into that.

TP: You now, in your role now as a Director of Wasps, do you look back on that younger self, that athlete or that coach, and think what I was thinking then, you know, I had no clue. Or have you just…?

TG: Yeah, I was a terrible coach when I first started I think.

TP: Really?

TG: Oh God, I think back to that first year…

TP: What constitutes a terrible coach?

TG: Well, two parts of it. So the first part would be the performance side. We made the grand final that first year and I had a good team and we were probably favourites to win, and at half time we were level and we weren’t playing well, and I came in and just tore strips off everybody. I just shouted, ‘cause I was on court, I was angry and angst, and I wanted to do. I remember the team talk; there was not one bit of constructive tactical technical bit. It was basically played better and we went out and we went goal for goal for the whole goal and we lost in the last 30 seconds, and I was devastated. And I look back at it now and go, that was just awful. I didn’t know how to control my emotions. And player management side as well, there wasn’t that honesty there so there were players in there that perhaps, you know, that thought maybe they were gonna be playing and I hadn’t had that conversation ‘cause I just presumed they knew weren’t at that time. So it was a massive learning curve.

TP: You say you didn’t know how to control your emotions. How did you learn that? Was it just a case of realising what had happened and then just sort of saying, okay, I’ve just got to sort myself out?

TG: That took time and that was growing up. Having my daughter helped a lot. I remember the first final I lost having Jamie and she was handed to me straight after the game and it changed everything. It was, you know, I haven’t got three days to mope around and be upset about this ‘cause this little thing wants to play with the confetti on the court that was shot over the other team, you know, it’s that simple. I grew up and you learn to control your emotions. I don’t think you can change your younger self; I think you just grow into what you want to be. You can look back at it now and some of the things I did were stupid, and actually as a player on court I’m a bit Marmite because I’ve had those emotions, but I don’t think I would have been as good or been in as many successful teams or won as much stuff if I hadn’t been like that. So I don’t regret any of that stuff but I think now I can look at it a lot more open and not be as fussed as I was back then.

TP: We’ll talk about the challenges. What’s something you’re most proud of?

TG: I think the year I won the super league just as a coach, not as a player coach, that’s probably the proudest moment.

TP: And why was that bigger than being a player coach?

TG: Because on court I can influence, because I can still do, I can still be out there, I can still make a difference court. I think to actually not be there and still give over the same passion and the instruction and still actually have done it without having to have played. Not that I was, you know, I’m not saying I was the best player on the court ever and definitely wasn’t in this final by a country mile, but you can change a lot more on the court than off the court. You have to say the right things and be the right person so I was proudest of that.

TP: Much of women’s sport is going through a massive transformation at the moment. Part of the challenges about trying to understand how to communicate the value to the external world and sports and teams are trying to engage larger audiences and find sponsors and build partnerships. Are those challenges familiar to you too?

TG: Yeah, definitely. I think all the sports are going through the same transition and it’s great we’re getting more and more coverage and people are talking about it more, but I’ve kind of found that’s been going on for a quite a few years now and we’ve come to a halt again about how we actually start to engage and big things for me have been looking at how it’s very different to how probably men watch male sports. And, yeah, the big thing with netball is how we’re getting more people to come to the games and watch and some of us being a mother as well how we’re getting women to not feel guilty about doing that or give time and have time with their families to come along to games and actually do something that they enjoy as well. Yeah, I think there’s lots of different angles on it at the moment and I’m trying to explore different ways, because I think in netball we’ve got to a point where we’ve got a great audience but we now need to move it forward again, and I think we’re all sort of at that same point, well how do we do that.

TP: Move it forward as increase it that little bit more?

TG: Yeah, definitely. I think the participation’s always there. I don’t think that’s the issue. Women are playing sport, you know. Kids are getting access at school. Yes, we’d like to do more and we’d like to have more clubs and more stuff going on, I know all that. But the biggest thing for me is this transition from the participation to the elite; how are we getting women to watch sport. What are they interested in? What do they like doing? And, yeah, how do I get regular… If I didn’t have any access to netball as a kid in terms of watching it, I knew my club and that’s all I ever saw. If you’d had seen the elite game, how incredible that would have been. So it’s now trying to make that transition and go hang on, there’s some great sports happening all the time, there’s some great role models, come along and see it, you know, come along and do something different for the day and see if you enjoy it.

TP: I remember watching my first elite netball match and that was probably about five years ago. I grew up in America and netball wasn’t there at all, it was just not part of my experience at all, and I saw the first elite game on the TV, England v Jamaica I think it was, oh God, it was amazing. The athleticism, I was just absolutely captivated. How important has Sky’s involvement been do you think to the growth of netball?

TG: Huge. You can’t take that away. They’ve put it into the forefront, they’ve made people aware of it, they’ve jazzed up the game, they’ve shown it as an actual technical sport as well. I know when I do the analysis on Sky and we do the Sky Pads, the amount of feedback we get from that, people are like we’ve never had that input, we’ve never seen that part of it before and it was taken seriously. And I do quite a bit of work with Sky and actually, you know, Sky do so much for our sport and actually we’ve now got to stop necessarily going, oh the media don’t show enough. Yes of course we’d like more stuff, but Sky are doing a fantastic job. What I want to say now is actually let’s support that, let’s watch the games, let’s go online and see the clips and the highlights and see the analysis and actually give back to it and start supporting women supporting women, because I do genuinely think that the media have been a game changer for us and actually now we need to start repaying the favour if we want it to keep growing and growing and growing.

TP: Do you have a sense of how to tackle this challenge?

TG: I wish. No, I think culturally we are always gonna struggle ‘cause we’re different. I spent a lot of time in Australia and actually some of the stuff that doesn’t necessarily transfer just because culturally we’re very, very different, and I don’t always think that’s the answer. I think there are different ways of doing it. I’m still not sure we’re getting the message out to everybody and I’d like to see that. So for example, we’ll have schools come and watch. So a school will bring fifty kids to come and watch a game of netball and they absolutely love it, and they go home. What I want to see then is parent go, oh you really enjoyed that, cool, I’ll take you again another week. And I know what it’s like, I’m busy as a parent and there’s other things going on, so it’s how we try to change that and make sure they’re getting the message and actually starting to do something, whether it’s hockey, football, rugby, cricket, netball, whatever it is the sport they’re involved in, that you can have more impact. And, you know, that’s something that I hope I’ll be able to transfer to my daughter as well. But sport’s always been my passion so it’s now trying to find that way to engage other people that perhaps haven’t got into it or haven’t necessarily thought that that’s the mum-daughter thing that they’re gonna do. So I think there’s different messages to get out there and that’s something I’m trying to look into.

TP: You’re part of the Wasps family. Is that important to be part of or has that been significant being part of a bigger grouping? How does that…?

TG: Definitely. The brand has helped hugely, just by having a name and a sort of professional element to it, and that’s behind the scenes and then when you’re talking fan base. And I think it’s the future. I think it’s the way that sports are gonna go cross across into many different areas and angles, whatever that works, whether it’s a football team, a rugby team, a cricket team. I think that works for us as well because when you get an affiliation to a club over here, whether it be football or rugby or cricket, it does cross over, and the amount of interest we’ve had from men that bring their sons to the rugby game or come with their family that’s gone, oh my wife plays netball or my daughter’s just started at school, oh maybe we’ll come to a game as well. We’ve had so much of that. And the brand helps because it does, you know, having people like JLR on board, we wouldn’t have necessarily got our foot in the door if it hadn’t been for Wasps.

TP: What’s the biggest thing you’d like to see change over the next, I don’t know, five years around netball?

TG: I’d love the league to become semi-pro, you know, that’s a massive thing. It’s moving in that direction. We’ve got England players that are full time but that gap now between the England players and that layer underneath is still big, so I’d love there to be 150 to 200 women in this country that are semi-pro athletes for netball. How amazing would that be that they can still build a career but they can actually train properly and play properly?

TP: And what needs to happen to enable that?

TG: Like anything, increase in numbers and attendances at games, bigger sponsorship and more coverage, but they all, it’s like chicken egg, you know, what happens first. So we get the spectators in, the coverage will then come.

TP: You’ve been an elite athlete, which is very much focusing on the self, and then a coach focusing on the athletes and now director of Wasps Netball focusing on the team and the bigger sports. What’s next? NGB? Does Jo Adams need to watch her back?

TG: No, not yet. The business is not my forte. You know what? I constantly think like that. You know, I won’t coach for ever. The sport is more important to me than being involved in one thing. I love what I do at the moment and I’ll always be involved in netball. I want to help the sport. It’s always what I’ve been passionate about from day one and I’m not prepared to give up on it. So whatever that angle takes, you know, whatever pathway I go down next it’ll be to help, encourage the sport and to do what we’ve talked about, because I genuinely think it’s still a blank page and for most women’s sports I think they’re just at that edge where we could take it forward and it’s just about finding the right spark.

TP: It’s an exciting time.

TG: Yes.

TP: This pod cast is about performance, it’s about different people’s views on what success is. I mean you’ve touched on that throughout the whole conversation, but I just want to ask you more directly. What’s success for you personally?

TG: I think there’s always a goal, so the goal each year for success is to win or to achieve this target or that target. But I think, and especially this year, I took a bigger step back from that for success. You can’t win every single year. You can’t keep winning. It’s not what it works. So what is it? And I think the answer for me was the journey. Yes, we had a goal, we wanted to get there, but from this year I learnt that there were many different ways to go and wind, and actually some of those ways were really good fun. Some of them were awful, not gonna like, some of them were awful. But I think success for me now is much bigger than that ultimate end goal. It’s about the journey and what you’re on and that’s kind of how I feel. So everything, there isn’t ever an end goal because if you didn’t win this year there’s always something to do next year and there were always some other bits that I collected on the way that made it a bigger purpose, and that’s kind of how I feel about it. Not always after the grand final when I’ve lost, but I’m trying to see success now as a much bigger picture.

TP: I’m just gonna end up with some quick fire questions. What did you eat for breakfast?

TG: An apple. How boring is that?

TP: Sounds [unclear 00:20:44]. Favourite piece of kit.

TG: Favourite piece of kit, like playing kit?

TP: Any kit you want, however you want to define that.

TG: Favourite piece of kit is my first England dress.

TP: Sporting hero.

TG: Ooh, Roger Federer.

TP: Why?

TG: Because I think the way he’s evolved as a player I think is absolutely incredible, and look at him still going now.

TP: Most useless piece of advice you’ve been given or given to somebody else.

TG: That I need to be taller.

TP: Need to be taller.

TG: To play goal attack. Can you believe that I was given feedback on that? You need to be taller.

TP: Okay. Greatest passion outside of sport.

TG: Oh God. Oh, that’s really sad. Do I have one? Greatest passion outside of sport. You know what? It’s just family time, like hanging out with my daughter, like whatever she’s into, being passionate about that, which is princesses at the moment and unicorns.

TP: How lovely. Look at you. Best performance enhancer.

TG: Best performance enhancer. You know what? Sleep. Getting enough time to actually be able to train and do everything properly.

TP: Well it’s been brilliant talking to you, Tamsin, thank you very much.

TG: Thank you.

TP: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionofperformance.com

[End]

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Ep 25. Kate Dale – behind the scenes of a national campaign

1st January 2018 by tammyparlour Leave a Comment

In episode 25 we talk with Kate Dale who is campaign lead for one of the highest performing behaviour change campaigns in the UK – This Girl Can. We discuss her personal love of the stories and drama of sport, find out what it was like right before the campaign launched, and discover the importance of “going where people are at”.

Former journalist Kate Dale is Strategic Lead, Campaigns at Sport England. Kate is responsible for delivering This Girl Can, Sport England’s multi-award-winning campaign, which is changing the way millions of people think about exercise and physical activity, and has seen 2.8 million more women get active as a result.

Prior to this, Kate spent 10 years as a trade magazine editor before becoming a brand and content specialist for major online banking institutions including Barclays. When time permits, she like to takes part in triathlon, learn to dance and perform with immersive theatre groups such as You Me Bum Bum Train.

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TX: 01.1.18 – Ep 25. Kate Dale – behind the scenes of a national campaign

HOST: TAMMY PARLOUR

T: Welcome to a Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views and what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

Today I’m talking with, Kate Dale, who is the campaign lead for one of the highest performing behaviour change campaigns in the UK ‘This Girl Can’. We discuss a personal love of the stories and drama of sport and find out what it was like right before that campaign launched and also explore how important it is to go where people are at.

Throughout the interview she asked some powerful questions of herself and listeners but first I asked her to describe what exactly she does.

K: So yeah I’ve been at Sport England for 14 years nearly. Joined as a website editor, set up the first website and the role has changed over the years but for the last three years I’ve been responsible for ‘This Girl Can’ our behaviour change campaign to get more women and girls more active.

T: Gosh, so not a small job that one?

K: Yeah it’s been a hectic few years but it’s been unbelievably fantastic as well.

T: I just wanna backtrack a bit because you were a journalist first was that right?

K: Yeah I left university not knowing what to do but loving writing. I don’t think I knew enough really then about the different types of careers that were open to someone like me and I was so shy in those days. But yeah and so looked at journalism as in a journalism diploma and became a marketing journalist so very much in the business to business side rather than, sort of, hectic Fleet Street as was side. But yeah, spent about 10 years doing that before the first dot-com evolution came along.

T: Moving from that sort of journalism and now working in the digital space must be quite different and a lot of people talk about how much things have changed over that time what do you think is still the same?

K: A story is still a story. A good story is still a good story and we can get really caught up in the technology of how it’s delivered but what makes something interesting or someone interesting or something catch your eye is because it resonates with you as a person. And it doesn’t really matter how you come across that whether it’s someone talking to you, something you’re reading or a Twitter feed that pops up on your phone.

T: What is it that excites you about?

K: It’s people. I’m nosy I like people and people are endlessly fascinating, endlessly frustrating sometimes but that’s what makes them more fascinating but finding out what makes people tick. And so I think the world that we live in now the digital space, social media, all the problems that it can bring I just think it’s utterly fabulous because you can now find people who think and feel like you. You can find your tribe, you can challenge yourself, probably don’t do that as much as we should do because we… create my own little echo chamber. But you find people who listen, you talk and you make connections.

T: Talk about ‘This Girl Can’. ‘This Girl Can’ you said is a behavioural change campaign but the digital era is also changing behaviour it’s changing how we connect, how we engage, how has ‘This Girl Can’ taken advantage of that?

K: I think with ‘This Girl Can’ it’s very easy to look at. I think we’ve produced amazing creative work, amazing ads and we’ve been lucky to have budgets that allow us to put ads on mainstream television and that has been a huge part of its success I will never deny that. But what’s its beating heart and what really sits at the core of it is the community of women that we have created that we have brought together who support and motivate each other. It’s about 800,000 women now on across Twitter and Facebook and it’s just lovely. If I’m ever having a difficult day whatever it is going and spending sometime on the Facebook page just makes me smile. It’s the support they give each other and that’s what in my experience women usually do anyway when you get them together and so there was one we had a woman posted that she had been shouted at, she had been out running and a man had shouted at her and said that she had a big bum. And she was really upset and it had knocked her confidence and from three days she had 2,000 comments from women in our community telling her everything from where he should go to what to shout back, to never mind. So the humour, reassurance, support tools, things that…ammunition that she could use to go back and it’s that sort of thing and just the way that it helps women support each other I think has been really important.

And that wouldn’t have been possible I think even five, six years ago that’s…

T: I’m a bit sort of flabbergasted by that figure 800,000 in the community how do you build a community of 800,000? How did that happen?

K: The longest and hardest bit of ‘This Girl Can’ I think was the 6-8 months when we were developing the concept and looking at the research and really understanding what it was. ‘Cause we started off knowing that there was a gender gap in participation 1.75 million at the time of launch and so really drilling down to that and understanding why and what it is and what was stopping women getting active. Because it’s not like we haven’t done stuff as an organisation, creating opportunities for women to be active it was after 2012 so the amount of messages that were…and it’s not as if women don’t know. It’s not as if people don’t know we know the health messages in life but that doesn’t necessarily change behaviour. So really understanding what were the emotional values and making those emotional…understanding those emotional things that were going on in women’s head and the reason why and the reasons why they were feeling that sport and physical activity weren’t relevant to someone like them.

So the women we’re targeting with ‘This Girl Can’ are [unclear 05:35] women but it’s particularly those who grew up perhaps feeling that sport and physical activity wasn’t for them. Maybe didn’t have a particularly positive experience at school or maybe did but as they’ve got older haven’t found a way of having it in their lives. And the less you do I think the less you feel it is for someone like you so I think using the insight and the data to really understand the women we were trying to talk to I think that’s where the community started building up and getting the right tone of voice. So we didn’t just talk at them it wasn’t just a monologue which feels quite ironic ‘cause I’m just doing a monologue now. But it wasn’t just a monologue we talked and then we listened. We didn’t lecture them, we didn’t hector, we didn’t tell them off. If they started going to the gym and then fell away I think we just humoured we were one of them really and we did it every day for 24 hours a day.

So it took a lot of work but it was very understanding in the first place.

T: Yes this was a massive shift for sporting to approach something like this to spend that amount of money on a campaign what did it feel like on the verge of launching that campaign?

K: It was terrifying. I remember the weekend before the ad was due to launch in the middle of Coronation Street on the Monday having sleepless nights thinking “What if nobody notices?” Because it’s not like with the John Lewis Christmas ad where everyone is waiting for it to drop and so really nervous and we knew… We thought it was good, we knew it was good it… Researched well, you do all your prep work but you don’t know till it goes out how people will react to it so really, really, really, really terrifying and then absolutely overwhelming.

And we had…somebody took a picture of us at the launch. Not really a party but the launch we were watching the ad go off and everyone sitting on their phones ignoring each other just seeing their Twitter feed scroll up and people just reacting and responding to it and it obviously… It was overwhelming actually the instant response and the instant connection people had with it.

T: Overwhelming in what way? Overwhelmingly positive, just too much to take in?

K: Really exciting. Obviously really, really happy but also and to a certain extent this has stayed with me slightly… You feel a real sense of responsibility because we’ve created something with women so it means quite a lot to women as well and so if we ever get anything wrong if we ever go off message, if they feel that we’ve let them down that… I feel that responsibility. We’ve got women who had [unclear 07:54] and you think “Oh gosh it’s part of their body now we can’t suddenly just say we’re not doing that anymore or change it’s direction.” So it’s in a really positive way and when I go and I talk to people about it and the amount of women who tell that it’s changed their life and had a positive impact on their life and it has on mine too not just in terms of my working life but my activity as well so I’m one of them. But it’s just it’s lovely, it’s really, really lovely I get quite emotional quite a lot.

T: Has the campaign evolved since it started? And in a planned…you’re nodding your head so…

K: Sorry for the record yeah.

T: In a planned way, in a reactive way?

K: A bit of both. We made…so between the first big burst of creative in 2015 and then again in 2017 we made some structural changes so the initial app focused mainly on women between 14-40 now we go up to 60 and beyond. We’ve picked up more live stage, live stages we focus specifically on things like menopause on childbirth on recovering from childbirth and the things because women’s bodies go through such dramatic changes throughout their life that and it has a relationship no matter what your sporty background is on on what it can do and when it can do things.

So we went through those but I think when we started out this was very new space for Sport England we were doing… I don’t think we would have called it a female empowerment campaign and I don’t think we would have felt that we could use language like that ‘cause it would have felt quite “Who do you think you are? You’re a sports organisation you build…” [Unclear 09:26] But that’s what you do so I think the confidence that we’ve had to maybe talk about some of the wider issues that this impacts on as well so for example been talking recently with Violence Against Women And Girls to look and think about the relationship between physical activity and either as a preventative towards difficulty… Not difficult abusive relationships but also in terms of recovery and going beyond, I guess, what are basically it’s…which is just to get more people more active. Actually thinking about the impact this has on people’s lives, on women’s lives beyond that.

T: What’s been your proudest moment?

K: Oh I’m trying to think there have been so many probably is…it’s going to sound cheesy but every time somebody comes up to me and says “I started running” or “I got back into netball” or “I did…” I think you get a real…

T: So it’s personal interaction as well?

K: Yeah and I’ve had some amazing opportunities as a result of it and some fantastic times. I spoke as part of South [unclear 10:27] Women of the World Festival which was just phenomenal took part in [unclear 10:31]. So all some really lovely things and there’s been so many times over the last few years I’ve had to pinch myself and think, “If you told 14 year old Kate that she’d be doing this she wouldn’t believe it and she’d be so happy.” You want to go back and tell yourself. But that’s just about me and my ego isn’t it? Actually what makes me proud is that I know and women have told me that it’s actually changed their lives.

T: And what have you found most stressful?

K: Probably it depends what day you ask me that question. Really I think the most difficult one actually was preparing and working out what we do for the second [unclear 11:06] launched in 2017. We, sort of, laughed and called it second album syndrome but it really was because as I said all these women you don’t want to disappoint there’s a weight of expectation. It had been so successful the only way felt like down and coming up with something that really matched that, plus we were doing it we were creating this all in, sort of, September/October/November of 2016 which was a really interesting time for gender politics given that we were in the middle of the American Election and all the… Everything that that swelled up I think as well so it was a very political time for making the ad which actually I think allowed us to create the advert we did with phenomenal [unclear 11:44]. And I think it allowed us to go further with that than we would have done before because I think it was about the time of the Million Women March and everything else and so preparing for that and thinking about what do we do? How do we build on something that’s been so successful? That was difficult.

T: How do you know if you’re doing a good job on it?

K: I think, I mean, the corporate answer, I guess, the corporate answer is…and quite rightly because this is an investment of public [unclear 12:12] money and it’s an amazing [unclear 12:14] and amazing, it’s transformed not just sport but so much in this country. But the corporate answer really because it’s public money and quite rightly we measure so we have vigorous [unclear 12:24] in terms of the number of women who are active but also through studies particularly on ‘This Girl Can’ impact on how it’s changed women’s attitudes in their confidence and how relevant they feel sport and activity is to them. So we get research data so that measures it but to be honest there’s a time lag to that because everything goes out and then you find out a few months later and thankfully so far anyway it’s always been positive.

I think this is, I guess, the blessing of social media you know because you get the feedback straightaway and when we launched the first campaign we weren’t expecting to happen was women taking their pictures next to the billboard ads and sending it in and so [unclear 13:00] putting that up. And to me this is my first ad campaign I think that’s normal but apparently it’s not so I’m going to be very disappointed if I ever do something not in this space.

And then the second time when the billboards went out the first time we knew the [unclear 13:13] had gone up because they’ve gone a little bit earlier than we planned was women tweeting pictures of it so I think that immediate connection the fact that so many women are prepared to say “Yeah this is me and I’m gonna share it on my media” show you know and it’s not just that they liked it it was that they were putting themselves in the pictures of it and they were talking about the impact it had had on their own personal physical activity. So I think that and the fact that the sector as well, the sport sector that I work in, has taken it onboard too. ‘Cause that was the other bit we talked about this big behaviour change for the women it was behaviour change for Sport England and it’s behaviour change for our sector in maybe adapting some of the ways we’ve traditionally promoted marketing, talked about delivered sport so that it can reach a wider range of people, sort of, spectrum that’s the phrase I’m looking for.

T: You’re strategically campaigns and you cover brand and digital what have you learned about along the way?

K: I think for me and I think what’s really interesting for me in the way that my… The focus of my job has changed is initially when I talked about [unclear 14:12] or thought about [unclear 14:13] you think about the things you think about the channels and technically how you make all that work not the coding. I can’t do that but the technical, the content you put on there how you structure it what it does and you’re thinking about the things and the same with brand as well you’re thinking about whether it’s that [unclear 14:28] references and logos and what have you or something a little bit more experiential but you’re thinking very much about the mechanics that you have in front of you.

Switching it over thinking about it as campaigns it becomes much more focused on what you’re trying to achieve, who you’re trying to reach and what you’re trying to get them to do and more crucially going to where they are not where you want them to be. So that’s been one of the other fundamental things with ‘This Girl Can’ in one of our principles that we always trot out is go where the women are. So it’s not about dragging them onto our website necessarily, it’s not about dragging them to our mind space it’s understanding theirs and addressing that. And I think I see it so much with communication and I will have done it so many times over the years, you think about, well, I want to get this message across and I’m going to do it in these ways.

And you get people coming to you and saying that I need a PDF or I need a website or I need a CD ROM, I’m going back a bit now aren’t I? I need a DVD. I’ve been through them all. And it’s not what we need to be saying is “Okay who is your target audience? Where are they now? Where do you need them to be?” You identify that and then you can use all your banded [unclear 15:30] specialist to help you create the journey that takes them along there. But we get fixated by the mechanics rather than what we’re trying to achieve.

T: Just gonna move tack just a little bit this pod cast is about performance, it’s about different peoples views on what success is, what success or performance however you want to whichever way you want to what’s success or performance to you?

K: I think my views on success and what success looks or feels like has changed recently and I think it’s become much more about feeling. I’ve been really, really lucky and I’ve worked on a campaign over the last few years which is so aligned to my values who I am, my life long feminism it’s something that it’s so, so personal to me. It was very easy for me to say “Oh success is about going home at the end of the day and feeling that you’ve done something which is really true to yourself. I haven’t had to make any compromises really.” What I find interesting about this is I actually find it quite an uncomfortable question to answer.

T: Yes well I think I would too.

K: Obviously and I [unclear 16:33] all sorts of profound things about what it says about my inner psyche and possibly turn this into some sort of therapy session about it.

T: Well I suppose one could ask is there such a thing as success?

K: You see I think one of the things that’s interesting as well is over the years through ‘This Girl Can’ but before that I’ve been really lucky and met lots of really incredible sports women and men and listened to them and talked to them and to me you think, “Oh well your definition of success is really easy, isn’t it, because you win a medal or you don’t. You win the trophy or you don’t. Or you do your part of the team or you don’t. Or you get selected or you don’t.” And it’s very cut and dried and but actually talking to them and it’s not necessarily that straightforward is it? And it’s much more about personally do you feel that you’ve been able to deliver everything that you could have delivered? Or have you…and I could use the “Have you left everything on the field? “

And so I think that’s what performance is if I’ve done something will I know that even if it didn’t work or I didn’t get the result I wanted to there’s not realistically anything more that I could have done. Then I think that’s probably performance more than success isn’t it? But I think what motivates me is more the mechanism of… it’s more that process of the doing of it necessarily rather than what it achieves.

T: Yes absolutely yeah.

K: Which I don’t know if that necessarily is helpful to me in life ‘cause I think that pushes more into being a doer rather than being defined as an achiever because it’s I’m not a success at all costs it’s more about… And it’s not about whether just have enjoyed it in the terms of have I had fun along the way? But I do think that’s important, it’s more about have I found the process stimulating and creative and interesting? Have I learnt something? I think I probably get bored quite easily so there always has to be something new and challenging and something new to grab my attention.

T: It’s a complicated question. I suppose I’ve got another complicated question for you or a difficult question and that is do you feel successful?

K: God no. No. No but then yeah I think I’m a bit of a restless soul to be honest. I suffer from anxiety which doesn’t make me particularly unique and I’m not saying it does but I think I’ve bee only really recognising in the last year or so I think the debate about mental health that has really come to the… Not the debate but the discussion and the awareness raising of it that has been certainly for me has been hugely, hugely helpful because it’s helped me actually think about patterns of behaviour or patterns of thought. It’s not behaviour it’s patterns of thought that haven’t been helpful to me along the years and instead of thinking “Well I just have to stop it” which is what I always thought in the past now it’s about “Okay well when certain things happen I have certain triggers my mind’s going to spin out and I’m going to imagine the worse case scenario because that’s what I do.” So I just process it now and I just let it flip over. Steve Peters, [unclear 19:14] actually helped me enormously with that it’s in his book but… what was the question again? It was what? Am I successful? Yeah.

T: Yeah sorry.

K: Yeah so I think so because of that anxiety then maybe it’s harder to think that until you’re a CEO or you’re those or you’re that or the other then…

T: Until something disappears?

K: Yes it would be yes. But it’s the equivalent of God I spent… I’m mortified to make this but I spent so much time in my…I’ve never been particularly thin and I’ve never been particularly happen with my body I spent an awful lot of time in my teens, 20s and 30s even thinking “Oh when I’m thin” or “When I’m slim” or “When I’m this” everything life will fall into place and one of the many joys of being older is I’m bored of caring about that now. I wanna be healthy, I’d like to be healthier but this arbitrary ridiculous definition of what I should look like has gone and so I think what I’m now trying to talking about it now actually thinking about is trying not to do some thing internally which is the same of when I’m no longer anxious then everything will fall into place. ‘Cause probably I’m always going to be so therefore actually success for me is not letting myself get caught up in that loop maybe.

T: Just going to end with a few quick fire questions. What did you eat for breakfast this morning?

K: Oh I missed breakfast but I had elevenses I had a ham and cheese toastie.

T: Favourite piece of kit?

K: Shoes you put on your running shoes, your trainers you’re ready to go.

T: Sporting hero?

K: Paula Radcliffe. When I am active it’s running that I do now and there’s something about Paula and I think maybe because we saw her not always succeed is that really showed to me that sport isn’t inevitable success just because you’re really good. But she kept going and she came back and has come to terms with that very high profile failure.

T: I love that sport isn’t inevitable.

K: If you want a reality show that’s what sport is there’s no script, there’s no guarantees. You don’t know until the final whistle blows or who’s going to win and it can turn on a knife-edge and it’s personal drama. Cath Grange is another one I love and her determination and to come back and that when she came off… Oh which Olympics was it? When it was the one, 2008 Beijing when she said “Always a bridesmaid, Steve” and then to come back in 2012 and risk heartbreak again and win and that was the gold medal I cheered for the loudest, so Cath would be up there too.

T: Most useless piece of advice you’ve been given or given to somebody else?

K: Be more like a man in meetings is the most useless piece of advice I’ve ever been given because why? It makes me really mad. First of all why? Why do we have to be more like them why can’t they be more like us? Or why can we just all find our own way of communicating and listening to each other? And secondly it’s useless because I can’t because I’m not that’s not my communication style, so there’s no point in it. Make most of who you are and play to your strengths don’t play to what you haven’t got.

T: Sounds like brilliant advise to me. Greatest passion outside of sport?

K: Feminism.

T: Best performance enhancer?

K: Your best friend to go running with.

T: Fantastic. It’s been brilliant talking with you today, Kate, thank you very, very much.

K: Thank you I’ve really enjoyed it.

T: Thanks for listening, you can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to A Question of Performance.com.

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Ep 20. Reshmin Chowdhury – sports broadcaster on the challenges and rewards of a media career

20th July 2017 by tammyparlour Leave a Comment

Can you have it all? In episode 20 we chat to BBC and BT Sport Broadcaster Reshmin Chowdhury. We discuss the captivating nature of sport, how as a mother of two she juggles multiple responsibilities and how one always has to be at the top of your game on live sport.

Reshmin Chowdhury is a multilingual sports presenter, reporter and event host, broadcasting globally for the BBC and BT Sport. She is one of BT Sport’s key reporters for the UEFA Champions League and Europa League. She also works across BT’s FA Cup, BDO Darts World Championship and NBA coverage and previously anchored the network’s nightly news show, SportsHUB.

For the BBC, Reshmin has covered news from almost every recent major sporting event for BBC World News and the BBC News Channel since 2010, most recently reporting for BBC Radio 5Live at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio.

Reshmin began her career at Reuters TV News and honed her skills as a producer at BBC News, ITN and Bloomberg TV. Her work has taken her as far afield as Africa, Asia and the Middle East. She is an ambassador for the Prince of Wales’ charity, the British Asian Trust and the Heart4More Foundation. She is a keen mentor, working at Kick it Out’s “Raise Your Game” conferences and the Mosaic charity.

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TX: 01.7.17 – Ep 20. Reshmin Chowdhury – sports broadcaster on the challenges and rewards of a media career

HOST: TAMMY PARLOUR

TP: Welcome to A Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views on what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

[Music]

Today, I’m with sports broadcaster Reshmin Chowdhury. I’m a big fan of Reshmin and that’s not just because she gave me home made muffins for my journey home. Reshmin has a spark, a strength and determination that I find really quite motivating. In her interview she talks about the captivating nature of sport, how as a mother of two she juggles multiple responsibilities and how one always has to be at the top of your game when you’re on live sport.

I started by asking her what sport was like for her growing up.

RC: Sport for me growing up was a massive part of my life in terms of sitting on the sofa with my brother or my friends and watching it but doing sport was never, ever something that I really considered. Sport was never that important to my family really, it was never something that they encouraged actively. My dad genuinely … this is a true story, he actually thought I would be tired if I did sport so it was just something, he said, oh, you don’t want to do sport, you’ll just get tired. So it was just never seen as something that was a necessary part of life. If you weren’t part of the PE gang, the enthusiastic ones that always wanted to do sport … I don’t think PE teachers when I was growing up were that great at encouraging you otherwise. I was always quite happy to find an excuse, oh, it’s the time of the month, I don’t think I can do it, although there was always something, oh yeah, I just don’t feel well, I’d always come up with something ’cause it just wasn’t … I wasn’t interested in exerting myself and doing any kind of sport. But it’s such a stark contrast to my interest in sport because I watched pretty much everything, I think golf maybe is the only thing I didn’t really watch growing up. Maybe there’s one or two others but out of all the major sports it was, you know, I was a complete sports nut.

TP: How come, what captivated you?

RC: Oh, well, growing up I think the Olympics and … yeah, Olympic events were always massive in our house so we always used to watch but in terms … but footfall is the big sport that I love and that was a very, very clear moment in my life, that was during World Cup ’90, it was taking place in Italy and it’s really silly really, I was at my family home and don’t ask me why but I was somebody who used to just love tidying the house at weekends. That was not something that was instilled in me by my parents, I think that was just the kind of person I was. I like things being in order. And my parents’ bedroom had the TV on and Gary Lineker scored a goal in a group game during this tournament and I genuinely was, I use that word, captivated, I was absolutely mesmerised by that on TV, you thought, god, that was … this football lark’s not bad, is it?

TP: What was it, was it the way he did it, was it the crowd reaction?

RC: I think it was his reaction, the team reaction and the crowd, it was just the general elation of what it meant to score and make a difference in that game and to win the game. And then from that point on I watched every single game with my family during that World Cup and it was a really magical World Cup, I don’t think I’ve seen one like it and it was, you know, with England getting to the semi finals, Gazza’s tears, it was … and then Cameroon, Roger Miller, the dancing, [unclear 0:03:50], you know, the Brazilian players doing their baby celebrations, there was so much that happened in that World Cup that was amazing so it just stuck with me and then from then onwards football was a massive part of my growing up.

TP: Was it a given that your career would end up going into sport?

RC: No, I wouldn’t say it was a given, I think the fact that I had an interest was a big thing, I wanted to work in sport, at that time Des Lynam was the presenter of Match of the Day and I always used to say, I want to do his job when I grow up, I want to present with him. But, to be honest, there was never … you know, later on when I went to university and I studied politics and economics but there was never any set route to do sports journalism, it’s not like it is now, now there are real … I think journalism, the media industry, yeah, there are real pathways, it’s opened up a lot but during my time it wasn’t so it wasn’t at all actually so in sports journalism was even further away so … No, it was something I would … if someone had told me when I was watching that goal going in I would eventually be doing the job that I’m doing and actually working on the same show as Gary I’d say, no, that’s just silly, you know. But it would be exactly what I would have wanted, but I just wouldn’t have seen a path to reaching it.

TP: Yes, we’ll come back and talk a little bit more about your path. Your bio on various websites …

RC: Oh god, which ones?

TP: Says that you’re a broadcaster. Talk to me a little bit about what you currently do.

RC: I just talk to people about stuff. At the moment I work for two broadcasters, one is the BBC, so I work for their sports news department and I have done for the last seven years or so, give or take a couple of stints of maternity leave. So I present sports news on the 24 hour news channel and BBC World and I do various other things as well. And then with BT Sport who are the newer broadcaster on the block, I work on their European football coverage so I report on the UEFA Champions’ League and the UEFA Europa League as well at various games throughout the season. So, yeah, I do a bit of everything actually which keeps me motivated and happy as well because I’m not just stuck behind an autocue reading that all day, I’m not just on the road the whole time, I get a real variety in my work which I love. I also host a lot of events and things like that so that’s all … it all keeps me very excited about what I do.

TP: You’ve covered news from almost every recent major sporting event since about 2010, I think, are there any that stand out for you?

RC: 2012, London 2012 was just …

TP: Why, or is that a silly question.

RC: No, it’s never a silly question, it’s just I think there are so many dimensions to why that stood out but I was … for that one particularly I was working on BBC World News for most of that and we had to give sort of updates at the top of every hour and the back of every hour and I remember the BBC was based in a former council block that it had bought out, it bought out kind of the top floors I think, or maybe the whole building, don’t quote me on that but anyway our studios were built at the top of this building that oversaw the entire Olympic Park so we got an amazing view of the whole thing and our offices were a couple of floors down so I remember just running up and down the stairs every hour to go and give these updates and it was just, you know, as fast paced … there were results coming in all the time, it was so exciting but, you know, this is on our doorstep, quite literally on mine in some ways, you know, being able to work not just for any other broadcaster but for the BBC, you know, the host broadcaster, the big broadcaster that I’d grown up with and respected since I was a kid, there was no one else I wanted to work for. And to work on the London Olympics, my home Olympics, with them was just fantastic and the stories that came out of it … I mean that’s by the by but that goes without saying but it was a magical, magical time and London was as I’d never seen it before, a lot of people can testify, it was just such an exciting place to be, everyone was so happy and nice and kind. It was fantastic, it was amazing.

TP: What are the biggest stresses in your line of work?

RC: In my line of work … I think there are a lot of stresses with general journalism because you have a responsibility to be accurate, you have a responsibility to be on the ball, get things right and produce, whether it’s live TV, whatever it is, you have to be at the top of your game all the time, if you have an off day, it happens to everyone, but you shouldn’t really, when you switch on the … yeah, and you know, when you flick the switch to perform you have to perform so that’s one side of it I think. There’s a lot of research that goes into what you do as well so you don’t just perform on the day, everything you do is leading up to that as well, you’ve got to build a lot of knowledge, you’ve got to show credibility, I think in what you do as well, so there’s a lot of that. I’m on TV so when I’m travelling the thing I have to remember, you know … the hair straighteners, you know, all the things that … what am I going to wear, these are things that are important to me so that’s another thing that I have to think about on top of all the basic elements of actually match prepping and getting all of that right but I’m also a mother of two, I’ve got two young children so that in itself is a massive job so it’s a huge balance and …

TP: Must be quite a lot to juggle. Talk to me a little bit about that.

RC: Oh, god, do you want a full on moan, or …? You know, it’s hard, I mean I think we were saying, there probably are other people that do the job that I do but I don’t … I can’t name them unless you can, I don’t know a female sports reporter who has children, you know, as young as me who travels as much perhaps, maybe Jackie Oakley would be a closer example, I don’t know how much she travels though, I don’t know what her timetable is but possibly ’cause she goes away as well for stints and things like that … and actually, yeah, Jackie’s probably the closest because I remember we spoke about it once and she said to me, how do you do match prep, I said, my god … match prep, that whole thing. It’s true because we both have the same issues and it’s wow, it blows your mind, I think … I’m not sure that I breathed in the last few years because it’s just a lot to take on all the time and I think there was a time when everybody, I think, in a working environment would put everything behind them and just, you know, make sure that they could just concentrate on the job, no, nothing’s too stressful, nothing’s too difficult and I think no, I make a point of saying to my bosses, look, I need to plan around my children so let me know because I think people do need to understand that side of your life otherwise it’s just impossible, you can’t keep saying everything’s easy, yes, I can do that, yes, I can do that as well. Well, I can’t because I have a responsibility elsewhere, I have one million percent responsibility to my job but I also have a trillion percent responsibility to my children as well so you have to have that balance. It’s on so many levels, I don’t even know where to start, you know, in terms of the practical sense of getting match prep done, getting everything ready in the house before I leave.

I was talking to a male broadcaster, a colleague of mine, and we were talking about lots of different things, it was a really open conversation about lots of things and I just said to him, you know, when I walk out the door and you walk out the door you probably do about, or you probably don’t even need to do about five percent of what I do before I leave the house and he said it’s absolutely right, because I leave, I close the door and my wife does everything. I’ve got no idea what’s in the fridge, I’ve got no idea what the kids are going to eat, I’ve got no idea what they’re going to do the next day. But that’s not the same for me, all of that stuff is in my head before I leave whether it’s making food before I go or whatever it is I’m doing and that’s, you know, that’s a lot to do before you’ve packed and got everything ready, you know, as I explained, there’s a lot of things that I have to do before I walk out the door. And I have family around me, I have parents and in-laws and support but even with that it’s still really, really difficult because if you want to be hands on, which I do, which I always am, then it’s a big balance to strike.

TP: Do you think it’s part and parcel of the job and doing the role that you do or do you think there are ways that the working environment could be changed in order to support mothers better?

RC: I think the job is what it is, to be honest with you. I think if you’re going away to report on a high profile football match and you love football and you’re working in it then I think you’re extremely privileged to be able to do that, I think it’s just that maybe it was a more male world, you know, maybe the people who do that job don’t have the responsibilities that I have in their home as well. You know, it’s equally difficult for a father leaving his children as well, don’t get me wrong because of course you all miss our family members but, as I explained on the practical sense, it’s not the same so it is very, very difficult. But I think that’s just the nature of the job and I think as long as your bosses are more aware of your life situation I think that’s a really important thing, I think it’s like everything it’s often about education and people just need to know what goes on in other people’s lives because if someone’s working for you it’s not just … it shouldn’t be that they’re just your employee, you send them out wherever they go and that’s it, you know, they need to … if they’re investing in you in any sort of way they need to understand where you’re coming from and who you are as a person and what’s important to you and your family situation. Some people might have, you know, they might not have children but they might be caring for somebody or whatever the situation is it’s … everything can be worked around but I think there just needs to be a greater understanding of it.

TP: Your experience through your career, what you’ve achieved in journalism and so forth does that affect how you bring up your kids?

RC: Yeah, I think massively. I think in my career I’ve never, ever, and I’m not getting out the violins, it’s just generally how my … like I explained there was no career path that was mapped out for me and I was never one of those people who was really lucky to find that mentor along the route either. I mean mine was literally … I was never, you know, picked out of obscurity to do anything in particular, I genuinely found my own path by myself and it was fuelled by the fact that I knew I would be really good at this job, I just knew it one million percent and I had a lot of backing from my family to … you know, they understood that passion in me. So because I’ve had that, nothing’s fallen into my lap. That absolutely drives me in a way that I bring up my children, I want … you know, as hard as it is I want them to see me working hard, I want them to know that I can give them that love in exactly the same way whether I’m there or not, I want them to be able to understand that, you know, a mother is a strong role model and I want them to know that. And I think having that respect for your mother, having that respect, you know, for a woman, particularly from the point of view of my son, you know, I want him to grow up seeing a strong female in the house and, of course, that goes without saying with my daughter, that’s a given. But particularly for my son as well I want him to able to see that, yeah, I think it massively influences, you know, maybe not in a day to day manner but I think overall the picture is they’re watching a mother who works really hard and, yeah, she can’t always be there all the time but the majority of the time she is so I want them to just know that … I think just working hard, I think that’s the point, you know, I’m not … I’m very rarely just sitting around doing nothing, I’m always busy and it’s a good thing, I don’t see it as a bad thing at all.

TP: What is success for you and are you successful?

RC: Hmm … that’s a really [unclear 0:17:19] question, yeah, it really is, you’re not bad at this, are you? Am I successful and what is success … okay, so success I think is reaching or going beyond a level that you thought was possible, maybe, I think, I think maybe that’s how I would define it. So yeah, I think if you exceed your own expectations, I think that … in whatever field, you should class that as successful, I don’t think you should compare yourself to others, I never look at myself and compare myself to any other broadcaster because there is no other broadcaster like me just like there is no other broadcaster like anyone … we are very individual in what we do. So I think that’s one side of success.

I think success is also your journey, so if you have overcome barriers, if you have had set backs and you’ve been able to do well in spite of them I think that’s success as well. So I suppose from those, both those angles I guess I’ve been successful. But then I don’t want it to stop there so there’s still more that I can achieve and want to achieve so I suppose at the point that I’m at I guess people would say that I’m successful but then I have higher aspirations so I think there’s more still to be achieved. But for me the big success is if I can balance everything in my life and do it well, like there is no perfect balance. I remember, it’s another million dollar question, can you have it all? Well, you can, I remember a good friend of mine who’s a journalist at the BBC, not in sport but in news, and she once said to me that I think you can have it all but maybe at different periods like there’s definitely a time for everything. And I really identified with that when she said it, I thought that was absolutely true because I remember when I was first producing and I was looking for that opportunity to go on air it was just never there, I had to go and find it myself, I went to Madrid for two years leaving my husband at home, you know, in London while I did that. And then I came back and then everything was going really well at the BBC but then they moved up to Salford and I was having a baby, and then I had two children very … within 20 months of each other and then suddenly as every mother will testify in a certain industry, particularly in my industry where you’re freelance and I think your success is completely dependent on your own endeavours and what you put in, when you’ve got two children to look after or just even a child or whatever the situation might be when you have another side to your life you’re completely in the wilderness, you’re wondering when am I ever going to be able to achieve what I want to achieve, how is it going to happen, my job was up in Salford, I have two children at home, I thought how on earth am I going to get my career back on track.

TP: How did you?

RC: Well I have an amazing boss at the BBC who is soon to be leaving, Nick Dixon is his name, and he’s absolutely wonderful, he’s always been lovely and he’s been very supportive since having children so he always … he was always very open to me coming back to work and also on my terms so he has a pool of presenters and people that he has at work but he always left the door open for me so I remember after I had my daughter I would go up to Salford once a month, a couple of days once a month and that was … you know, my husband, we worked that out with my family, we all worked it out and it was fine, it was doable, he would look after my daughter, he would come up, my husband is from Manchester anyway so it would work out he would be with his friends and then when I had two children that’s more complicated for him to take them both up so family got more involved and they would look after them and then I remember when BT Sport was launched in Straford and I said to my mum, I mean I live north east London and everything traditionally is based in the south or south west or whatever and I’m saying to my mum, we can’t just be … like there’s a major sports broadcaster on my doorstep now, there is no way I’m not working for them. I don’t care how it happens, it’s going to happen.

Very interesting how people in your community or in your circle perceive you doing the job that you’re doing, you know, it’s the criticism that you get as well by people saying you’re not … she’s a mother and how can she travel so much as a mother and all the stories that I have to hear from people, I’m very good at blocking it out because I think you have to develop a thick skin in this industry anyway ’cause you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t. But the number of times I’ve heard people saying, well, she’s away all the time, isn’t she, so what about her children, what about, you know, as if I’m neglecting them completely and just … and they don’t know what I do outside of that. And they also don’t know that I might be away for three nights one week but then the next week or for maybe the next two weeks I’m completely at home with them. And I can be, you know, the full time mum when I’m there and I think actually that’s better than leaving the house at 6:30 am and coming back at seven pm or eight pm at night five days a week. So I get it a lot, I get people in my community, I grew up in a lovely Asian Bengali Muslim community but people often say to my parents, well, so she’s away again, oh right, okay, god her husband’s so patient isn’t he letting her do all that, oh god how do you all let her do that … and people even say, Reshmin doesn’t need to go to the BBC anymore does she now that she’s got BT Sport, what planet are you people on and they just don’t understand but you know, the other day someone was saying to me, oh, you know, the children are very … you know, they’re so well mannered aren’t they, they’re very nice, aren’t they, oh yeah, but she travels so much, you just think, well ’cause I don’t teach them anything do I, it’s just ’cause I’m away all the time. You know, you have to fight fires, I feel like I fight fires all the time. It doesn’t bother me unless it’s someone close who thinks something and I think no, they should know me better. But if it’s someone on the outside I actually just … my mum said to me once, she said, [unclear 0:24:12] they’re either just stupid or, you know, they just don’t get what you do, or they’re ignorant, it’s something along those lines.

TP: Just brush it off.

RC: Yeah, you can just brush it off I think and you have to, it’s … and if someone asks me I quite happily stand up for myself and say, well, you know, this is my job and what I do, what do you want me to do, shall I just … and this is how a conversation came about with my male colleague and he said, what would people prefer, would they prefer that you just sat at home and did nothing, or just had a boring job that you didn’t like, or you just went to work for a couple of hours a day and then came back, you know, or maybe just presented for a day or two and then came back, is that what’s better or is what … you know, the job that you’re doing better where you’re actually learning and you’re enjoying what you’re doing and you’re actually developing and giving something, you know, it’s … yeah, that’s a hard one as well I think in terms of perceptions, how people see you and what you do and I think you just have to brush it all off, it’s hard sometimes, it is hard, I think the fighting those fires are actually really hard. But you just have to … because as a mother and, you know, as a parent, any parent, you will always get the guilt of am I doing enough for my kids, oh god, I’m away or you know only last week I was away on a job and I remember when it came through and I thought oh, god it’s my daughter’s first sports day at this big sports field and oh god she’s going to do the three legged race and it’s going to be so cute and everyone goes for the day and they all take picnics and I thought, god, I’m going to miss that. And you know I remember talking to the lady that booked me ’cause I knew she would understand because she’s also a mother, she said, to me oh god I had to watch her birthday party on Skype once, you know, and that’s encouraging to know that other people are in that same situation but you can’t actually do everything because there could be a parent who can’t take a day’s leave as well so you have to tell yourself that it’s all part of this particular job and there are good things and there are bad things or not probably the right words, there are positives and negatives and you just bring that …

TP: Like you say, when would you have three days of work but then able to have a chunk of time …

RC: Exactly, exactly, so I think it’s all about that balance but I think that’s a tough, definitely being a mother I think that’s a really tough part of the job that you have to … it’s hard enough balancing it yourself and the guilt but then when other people try to tell you that you’re doing the wrong thing and try to imply that what you’re doing is wrong I think… it actually makes me annoyed and angry and I think well they should just go away or they should try doing what I do and see if they can manage because it’s a tough balance for everyone so I think yeah …

TP: So we’ll end with some quick fire questions.

RC: Okay, let’s go, oh god …

TP: What did you eat for breakfast?

RC: I had nutty granola with yoghurt and maple syrup. It’s really nice, it’s really good …

TP: Favourite piece of kit?

RC: To take on a job do you mean?

TP: Whatever you want to define kit as.

RC: Makeup bag.

TP: Sporting hero?

RC: God, there are so many. You’d think I could answer this one quickly, wouldn’t you?

TP: Not when there’s so many.

RC: I don’t know where to start. I think someone like Jessica Ennis is fantastic but I mean there’s more.

TP: Why would Jessica Ennis be fantastic?

RC: I think she’s a great role model, I think, you know, she’s just … I’ve never met her, she seems like a lovely girl but she’s so down to earth, and I think it’s being able to excel at the top, top level and still come across as normal, I think that is lovely, I think that’s a really nice quality. So I think she’s someone I really respect and …

TP: Usain Bolt and …

RC: But I think of going back even further, there were loads, there were loads. God, do I actually have to answer it properly, have to really think, can I come back to it?

TP: Absolutely. Most useless piece of advice you’ve been given or given to somebody else?

RC: Again, I don’t even know where to start.

TP: Sometimes, I give people an out and say, or a piece of advice that you’d give but your face is just.

RC: Just so many things that I get told, I think being a parent you just get told so many things of how you should do this that and the other with a baby and most of them are … are just silly and useless so from my parents and from my in-laws, you know, you get stories about how they brought up their children, you know, back in the day and stories that they were told from someone in the village in Bangladesh and you’re just like, that is totally impractical.

TP: Greatest passion outside of sport?

RC: Well music I suppose, I grew up with singing so I think performing and singing was a big part of my life. But now it would be my kids really, they’re just, you know, I think for me having children, my life is much more balanced I think having children because it means that even if something happens at work nothing is ever that bad because, you know, I’ve got something that makes me really happy at home so I think yeah, I think my kids. They ground me.

TP: And the last one, best performance enhancer?

RC: Well … depends what I’m doing. I think it’s a mental challenge I think when you perform you’ve got to mentally be able to … as we talked about that switch that you flick and I think for me it’s what are people going to see, when they see you what are they going to see and that switch goes off whatever it is.

TP: Like a little mantra or something that you …

RC: No, I don’t say that, no, no, I think it’s something that is innate now, I always look at how people are going to perceive what I’m actually saying to them.

TP: Sort of step outside yourself?

RC: Yeah, you step outside yourself. I remember saying that to someone the other day like when I grew up singing it’s never about … you know, I could be singing to one person or I could be singing to a million people it doesn’t really matter what you do, you’re … I keep saying the word, don’t I, performance, but I think what you produce as a broadcaster has to be consistently at that level regardless so it’s, yeah, I think it’s that mental switch is my performance enhancer.

TP: Brilliant thanks so much Reshmin.

RC: Not at all.

TP: Appreciate talking to you today.

RC: I don’t know about the sporting hero …

TP: Oh, yes, the sporting hero.

RC: God, it would be footballer really someone I’ve grown up watching, I want to say Lineker though … even though … oh, it’s Gazza. I love Paul Gascoigne.

TP: Why?

RC: Because, just everything, I mean I know … I’ve heard stories outside, you know, from ex footballers that, you know, just … a bit too much to handle sometimes, he was always a bit silly, you know, whether it was funny or not, but I think as a performer I just loved his hunger for the game, I loved how he played, I thought he was just a fantastic footballer, World Cup ’90, the way he put himself out there and just that skill and that, you know, I think he’s just such a hero, and I loved watching him and I was … I became a Spurs fan after that World Cup as well because of Lineker, because of Gascoigne, Gary Mabbert and then … plus my brother was already a Spurs fan so it just made sense. And yeah, I think Gazza.

TP: Brilliant, thank you.

RC: No, thank you.

TP: Thanks for listening, you can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, and also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionofperformance.com.

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