Leading a Group: Take Aways from the Arizona Diamondbacks Mental Performance Summit

Dr. Ross-Stewart recently attended the Arizona Diamondbacks Mental Performance and Leadership Summit. As one of the thirty-one invited attendees, Dr. Ross-Stewart participated in three days of speakers and break out sessions with GM’s, Coaches, and Mental Performance specialists from across the United States and Canada. The Summit focused on leadership across different domains with speakers from different fields including Dr. Kensa Gunter Director of the Mind Health Program for the NBA, Chris Peterson Former Head of Boise State and current Fox Sports Football Analyst and Dr. Suzanne Bell Lead of the Behavioral Health and Performance Lab at NASA. Across all the speakers’ themes of leadership emerged that are important whether coaching your child’s youth sports team, working with college and professional athletes or in business. Here are five things to consider when leading a group:

• Culture is Reflected in Actions Not What You Say: Dr. Gunter spoke on the importance of leading withactions that set the stage for a culture of trust and psychological safety. This means making sure you are encouraging people to take risks in the pursuit of excellence. By being free to take risks people can push themselves past their current skills. To create a psychologically safe environment (something every speaker spoke about), you must allow others to be themselves and bring their perspectives and ideas to the group without fear of judgment. The environment must be a place that rewards vulnerability which starts with you not just accepting others but demonstrating vulnerability themselves.
• Who Are You Becoming as a Result of This Chase: Chris Petersen spoke passionately about his paths to the Rose Bowl and how it became all consuming to the point where he didn’t recognize himself or his priorities, leading to his decision to retire from coaching at the peak of his career. Now he mentors young coaches on how to pursue excellence on the field while taking care of themselves. As a leader if you are not sleeping, eating properly, or taking breaks, you cannot be your best self. Find the moments to grind and the moments to recover. This will keep you at your best and model personal and professional excellence for your team.
• FeedForward: Dr. Suzanne Peterson, Organizational Psychologist who works with fortune 500 leadership teams noted that often leaders spend their time either avoiding giving feedback or they only give feedback on what people did wrong in the past. Effective leaders, however, focus on feedforward, giving information on what people can do going forward to be successful. For example, a youth coach should be focusing on teaching a player what they can do to advance their skill for the next moment, not what they did wrong on the last play. Dr. Peterson’s work has shown that leaders who focus on “going forward” and “next time” have happier work forces and are more trusted by the people they lead.
• 2+2 = 5: Dr. Suzanne Bell’s task at NASA is to make sure she is putting the right people together for missions with the goal of making sure everyone’s attributes do not just work together but heighten the group. How can 2+ 2 = 5? Her work has shown there are several key considerations to help teams outperform expectations. The most important developing psychological safety (see #1 on this list), the next is the quality of communication. When teams focus on communicating with each other through what they say and how to listen and respond the output of the team increases. As a leader if you model the ability to be clear in sending a message and thoughtful in receiving information your team will communicate better and increase performance.
• Yes And: Travis Thomas a former improv actor and current leadership coach who spent four years working with the US Men’s National Soccer team works from a Yes and philosophy. This means as a leader we need to build an environment where we accept others’ ideas and contributions (yes and) opposed to disregarding stifling the ideas of others (no). Just as an improv actor always says “yes and” when given the unexpected, so too should a leader as they work to understand their team.

Leadership like anything else is a skill that needs to be done with care and intentionality. For more on leadership or any area of mental performance please reach out to Dr. Ross-Stewart our Director of Mental Performance.