Challenging Prevailing Mindsets in Elite Sport

Simon Timson is one of the world’s most successful performance directors in elite sport who has built his career on challenging prevailing mindsets to drive performance and innovation. During the past decade, I’ve worked with him and his teams at UK Sport, The Lawn Tennis Association and Manchester City football club.?

After completing a PhD in sports psychology, Simon took on his first performance director role at British Skeleton in 1996. Skeleton racing involves a head-first decent on an ice track using a tiny sled at speeds of 75-80mph. It became one of Britain’s most successful Winter Olympic disciplines in the ensuing decade. He convinced Amy Williams and Shelley Rudman to take up the sport and with engineers at BAE Systems developed the best sled in the world. The result was medals at every Winter Olympics from 2002 onwards, his legacy continuing with Amy Williams and Lizzy Yarnold’s gold medals at Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014.?

I first met Simon in 2012 when he was appointed Performance Director at UK Sport. He would be responsible for the strategic investment of over ￡445 million in Britain’s Olympic teams during the Rio cycle. In the following years, our work on mindset would become central to how he delivered success.?

Like other transformational leaders we’ve worked with, Timson shares the characteristics of openness, curiosity and positivity prevalent in the highest performers. However, at British Skeleton he made a profound mistake; one that almost cost him his job. The lessons learnt have carried him forward in his career. The challenge was to turn Skeleton from a recreational participation sport to an elite professional system. He recalls, ‘I developed the ‘perfect’ strategy and then, like a bull in a china shop, managed to build a defensive mindset in everyone that reinforced their existing beliefs.’ At the end of the first games, he was stood down and had to reapply for his job. Fortunately, he got a second chance.?

Simon’s first major mindset development –?strategic empathy?– came after a particularly difficult conversation with his mentor, the performance psychologist Lew Hardy. He struggled to understand why individuals in the Skeleton system weren’t open to change. He felt he’d made the case and they needed to execute it. Hardy reminded him that 80% of the Skeleton athletes were ex-military. He wasn’t treating them as equals because he didn’t understand and therefore respect their strengths and values. ‘These people are incredibly well trained’, Hardy told him, ‘The best at what they did in the world and unbelievably good at timekeeping and preparation. You, on the other hand, don’t keep time, fly by the seat of your pants, and nothing is written down, it’s all in your head. Therefore, they don’t respect you.’?

Timson started to see that the ability to stand in other’s shoes, to understand first, rather than judge people on their responses to his ideas and plans, unlocked a different approach. With Hardy’s help, he recognised that he needed to distinguish between the changes?he?felt needed to be made, versus the changes people were?capable?of making and?ready?to make. ‘You can only make the last two work. My job became to understand what people could achieve and then help them achieve it.’?

He took this insight into leading the performance directorate at UK Sport. Here his team needed to evolve from learning how to deploy the incredible increase in funds the UK Lottery had brought, to standing in the shoes of the sports to see how to help them increase performance.?

‘When I joined, my management team were incredibly frustrated and wanted me to go in and disrupt the system. Instead, I held them back for 12-18 months to understand how each sport could improve and how to mobilise readiness. The dividends of his ready and capable approach saw Team GB achieve a historic second place in the Olympic medal table, their best result in over a century, topping what had been a remarkable performance in the London games. No country had ever managed to improve on the advantage from a home games.?

Overcoming Defensiveness

One of the areas we worked on with Timson and his teams was creating an open mindset, alert to the risks of becoming defensive when emotionally triggered. Timson says that ‘this idea became central to our team’s performance at UK Sport and the LTA. Recognising when surprises emotionally trigger and shut you down - that this was about my sense of value being threatened - was a breakthrough.’?

‘It became a key habit for us to talk about being triggered and break down why an individual’s value was at risk. It created a deeper level of trust and understanding between us which enabled progress that I don’t think we could have achieved otherwise.’?

Reflecting on the turning point at Skeleton, was the advice his mentors gave him to see negative feedback as a gift. ‘This was incredibly hard, but unconsciously it started a process where I started to think differently about criticism, particularly when I could not separate the comment from the person. By taking your advice to see how my value was under threat, I started to take some different lessons from harsh critics. In some cases, it became almost the most rewarding moments of revelation.’?

‘Now, I rarely get deeply triggered when I’m prepared for conflict and arguments, because I’ve tried to understand how the emotions of others are shaping their sense of value. That really has helped me develop an open approach. But it’s still those moments when I’m least expecting it when I get triggered. I’ve seen that it manifests in me speaking more quickly or even starting to rant. This means I can usually stop myself, apologise, ask to rewind and start again. This has saved so much heartache over the years.’?

‘One area where it’s particularly important to understand how your sense of value operates is with the huge personalities in our world. The fear and anxiety of meeting someone like Andy Murray for the first time never go away. Now, I embrace those feelings and separate them from my value as just a physical response in my body to exceptional moments in my life.’?

Maintaining an open mindset has meant that Timson has been able to preserve another of his winning strategies – to engage with polar opposite views and succeed.?

How to be a Counter-Cultural Success

In each of Timson’s roles, he’s successfully led a culture change by not fighting from a corner. He’s consistently found that when he’s started a new role, people expect him to have a strategy and blueprint he will impose. Instead, he always starts with figuring out people’s and the system’s strengths and finding out what they really want to achieve. ‘It means drinking a lot of coffee with everybody, identifying the people who are most likely to undermine the situation, and understanding where’s the common ground that everyone shares. For some, it’s dissatisfaction with the status quo, other’s it’s not being listened to, understood or valued.’?

Another influence shaping his open mindset was talking with Emma Sky, who served as an advisor to Commanding Generals in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East in the 2000s. Her advice was that you always need to talk to the enemy, understand why they are fighting you and see if you can take that reason away from them to find peace. ‘Lew reminded me that most people don’t want to fight, so standing in their shoes helps you become less reactive to their anger or politicking. Sometimes you need to listen. Sometimes it means investing in them and seeing how you can amplify their strengths. So, now I always start with people’s vision and goals and then see how those things can align to achieve the organisation’s goals.’?

Just before Christmas 2019, Timson asked me to run a series of sessions with his new team at the Lawn Tennis Association to help them formulate a Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) for UK tennis. ‘The outputs were unbelievably valuable for the LTA because it established a mindset of abundance – we could achieve whatever we wanted to. It allowed us to ignore politics and engage people in what they wanted. It also enabled us to boil down this enormous ambition to just five clear messages and then make people accountable to what they said they wanted.’?

Establishing the MTP had the effect of moving people past the either/or politics. ‘A good example of what was holding us back was the lack of pro-style accommodation for the best young players. There was consensus that it was needed, but people mostly talked about how it was impossible to implement. The MTP allowed us to ask each stakeholder group how their strengths and value could contribute to a solution.’ By taking a less directive, more tolerant and facilitative approach, Timson has made less enemies and been able to meld mavericks and traditionalists into willing coalitions.?

Timson now works across another large performance system at Manchester City Football Club. He continues to work on the self-awareness that has shaped his mindset, making him one of the field's most inspiring leaders.

This article is taken from the e-book, Mindsets in Motion, by Jean Gomes and is available to download for free

Jean's latest book, Leading in a Non-Linear World , is available now.