Take a situation many teams will recognize. A senior player loses his temper with a member of the support staff, and someone has a quiet word with him. A younger player does the same thing and gets benched. If you were sitting in that dressing room, what would you take from watching those two decisions? Would you think the standard applied to everyone? And if you had a concern about the senior player, would you feel comfortable bringing it forward?
Most organizations have already chosen the words they want to describe them. Walk into almost any dressing room or head office and you'll see some version of excellence, integrity, teamwork and respect. The difficulty is that we can believe in those values and still make decisions that teach people something quite different. Respect can be written on the wall of an organization where people are afraid of the coach.
We learn the rules of a place through what happens there. We notice what gets rewarded, what gets ignored and who gets another chance. The psychology of learning has been describing this for decades: we learn from the consequences of our own behaviour, and we also learn by watching what happens to other people. Nobody has to intend to teach that the rules are different for people with more status for that to be what people learn.
It's understandable to call this hypocrisy, and sometimes that's part of it. But I don't think everyone who puts those words on the wall is lying. Many believe them, which makes me interested in what happens between believing in a value and making a decision that goes against it. If we treat the problem only as a failure of character, we may end up with another speech about values without changing much about the next decision.
In 2004, Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick described something they called ethical fading. They were interested in how people lose sight of the ethical part of a decision. Under pressure, a question about values can start to feel like a question about tactics, until the person making it may no longer experience it as an ethical dilemma. They also pointed to language as one of the ways this happens.
When we say, "That's a football decision," "Context matters," or "We need him happy," we may sincerely believe we're making a practical choice that leaves our values intact. I think it's worth paying attention to what those explanations allow us to overlook. They don't remove our responsibility for the decision, but they may help explain how we came to see it that way.
This was a theoretical paper, and it wasn't about sport, so it can't tell us what was in any particular coach's head. What I take from it is that we should be careful about relying on people to recognize a values question while they're under pressure. We need to do some of that thinking earlier, before anyone is in trouble and before we know whose place on the team might be affected.
I'd start by looking at the decisions we've already made, because they can tell us quite a lot about what we've been prepared to protect. I call this conflict archaeology. We sit down with the people who live with the consequences and look back over the last year or two, particularly at the moments when two legitimate priorities couldn't both be honoured.
These conversations tend to get useful when someone brings up a decision that still doesn't feel settled. People become uncomfortable, and there can be an understandable urge to explain why it had to happen that way or to move on. I ask what we protected and what we gave up, and then I try to leave enough room for people to answer. Someone may notice, for example, that although we talk about development, results have won every time the two have come into conflict.
We also need to pay attention to whose conflicts get discussed. People who already have a voice are more likely to get theirs heard. A player from abroad or a woman on an all-male staff may need someone to make room for their experience of a decision, especially if it differs from the account everyone else has accepted.
This hasn't been tested as a method. I use it as a way of working out what we need to ask about and where our account of our values may be missing something.
From there, we can look at how we'll make the next decisions, including discipline. First, some things should never be treated as ordinary team discipline. Abuse, harassment, retaliation, welfare concerns and credible risks of serious harm need an independent pathway outside the coaching chain. Nobody with a competitive or reputational interest should be able to override that process or hurry it.
In youth sport, the threshold should be lower, so if we're unsure whether something belongs in that pathway, it still goes there. Any urgent medical, welfare or safeguarding concern needs immediate action.
For other incidents, we should agree on a few questions and ask them whoever is involved. What happened, and how serious was it? Is it part of a pattern? If someone with much less standing had done the same thing, would we follow the same process and reach a similar outcome? We should also consider what the rest of the group will learn from how we respond.
The response should come from a range we agreed on before anyone was in trouble. The person needs to understand which standard was broken, what the consequence is and when it will be reviewed. We should then record the decision in the same way each time, on one page, so we can look back at what actually happened. Without that record, the next coach is left with people's memories of what the standard used to be.
This draws on what healthcare and aviation call Just Culture, including the distinction between an honest mistake and a reckless act. It also draws on research into procedural justice, mostly from workplaces outside sport, which suggests that people are more willing to accept an outcome they didn't want when they can see that the process was consistent.
The pathway itself hasn't been tested as a tool in sport, and it can't guarantee the right outcome. There will still be difficult judgments to make. Its purpose is to make inconsistency easier to see and give people something concrete to question when the response seems to depend on who was involved.
Applying a standard fairly also leaves room for differences that matter. We wouldn't give a ten-year veteran with a chronic knee problem the same training load as a rookie, and the group can understand that if someone explains the reason. How a person treats other people is different. We should be able to expect the same standard of behaviour regardless of someone's seniority or importance to the team.
For any of this to work, we also need to be clear about who gets to make which decisions. Who picks the team, handles discipline, decides playing time, clears a player medically and signs off on spending? These are what I mean by decision rights, and they need to be written down. When they aren't, the person with the most status in the room can end up making decisions that were never theirs to make.
One way to check is to ask three people, separately, who has the final say on those five things. If the responsibilities are clear, you should hear the same answers. If you don't, it gives you somewhere to look. The ambiguity may be accidental, or it may be benefiting someone. This is only a rough check, but it can help identify a problem that otherwise stays in the background.
We also need to think about what happens to the leader under pressure, because whatever process we agree on has to hold up during the worst week of their season. Researchers studying how organizations respond to threat have described attention narrowing and people falling back on familiar ways of doing things. That work comes from outside sport, but my impression is that a loss can pull a team's decisions back toward habit, hierarchy and protecting people with status, even when nobody has consciously decided to change the process.
The people around the leader may adjust before the leader notices. Think about the last time your team lost three in a row and whether anyone stopped bringing you bad news. It can be difficult to recognize that change when you're the person they've stopped telling.
That's why I'd want to consider a rule agreed on in advance: no major decisions for seventy-two hours after a loss, unless the decision was planned and written down beforehand. During that time, we can write down the fixes that feel urgent and return to them once we've had some distance from the result. Some may still make sense, while others may have had more to do with how it felt to lose.
Seventy-two hours is a practical guideline, and I can't point to a study establishing it as the right number. There's limited research on losing runs in elite sport. The rule also never means delaying action on an urgent health or safeguarding concern.
Most of the research I've described comes from workplaces, hospitals and aviation. A small number of interview studies in elite sport point in a similar direction. Researchers spoke with people who had led culture change in elite teams and found that clear roles and limits on power mattered, and that motivational appeals alone weren't enough. I think that gives us reasons to try these approaches and pay attention to what happens, while being clear that they aren't a tested recipe.
You could begin with the last three discipline decisions in your organization and read them side by side. If someone from outside looked at them, would they think the same standard applied to everyone? How much did it matter who was involved, and what would the people watching have learned from each response?
Putting those decisions in front of someone you trust and asking what they notice would be a useful place to begin this week.
Prefer to listen? Listen to Episode 4 — 27 minutes ↗. You can also find it on Spotify ↗, Apple Podcasts ↗, Amazon Music ↗, Overcast ↗ and Pocket Casts ↗.
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If you're catching up, Episode 1 ↗ explores the pressures people work under, Episode 2 ↗ asks whether it's safe to speak up, and Episode 3 ↗ asks what makes a sport culture toxic.
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Dr. MCB
P.S. This series draws on the book Madeline Antony and I wrote, The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership (Routledge). You can find the book here ↗.