Back when there was an appetite for such things Sir Dave Brailsford offered “20 lessons in leadership” for the website of a financial services consultancy called Harrington Starr. “The one biggest bit of advice” Brailsford had to give his readership was “to make people feel valued”. This, they learned, was “absolutely critical”, “a subject area of real importance and significance” because “performance hinges on people feeling genuinely valued in an organisation”. And it is easy to do, as Brailsford explained. “When you are under pressure a smile from a colleague asking ‘are you OK and what can I do to help’ can mean as much as any significant investment.” So “one of the best marginal gains that you can give your team is a simple smile”. And the best bit is “it doesn’t cost a penny!”.
Which is fortunate because hiring Brailsford to explain all this to you costs quite a few. He has an “AA” rating on JLA, the “UK’s biggest specialist agency for keynote, motivational and after dinner speakers”, which means he has a minimum fee of £25,000. In between running British Cycling and Team Sky Brailsford has been busy peddling the lessons acquired from his life in pedaling, working the lecture circuit, pushing books about what we can all learn from the way he works. No word yet on exactly when we can expect his autobiography What It Takes: Being the Best You Can Be in Life, Sport and Work, which was supposed to be published last autumn. Brailsford promised it would reveal “principles and methods to optimise personal excellence in all walks of life”.
In its absence an idea of Brailsford’s methods can be found in the hearings of the culture, media and sport committee, and an idea of his principles from the Daily Mail, which published a leaked draft copy of the independent review into the “climate and culture” of British Cycling. It describes Brailsford as “an untouchable figure” who kept the board “at arm’s length”, treated his staff “like children” and made them feel “like second-class citizens”. It notes Brailsford was “taking decisions about the multimillion-pound budget” by himself. British Cycling has received £78.5m in public funding in the last 12 years. We can rest assured Brailsford did not spend any of it on smiles.
Time was when British Cycling’s former technical director, Shane Sutton, was also looking to parlay his success as a coach into a second career as a management guru. He had an idea to write a book on leadership too. Unlike Brailsford, Sutton who, according to the review, referred to female riders as “bitches” and “sheilas”, and Paralympic riders as “wobblies”, does not seem to have had a knack for management-speak. But between them they created a “world-class performance programme” with “a culture of fear” that left some athletes feeling traumatised and bullied, and a “dysfunctional leadership structure” so badly managed the report’s authors seriously ask whether “the board is fit to govern a national sporting body”.
The best defence British Cycling has to offer was laid out in its subsequent statement. “British Cycling is widely recognised as having achieved remarkable success in not only Olympic, Paralympic and world championship terms, but also in bringing many new people into the world of cycling for both sport and recreation.” Well, the latest figures show that among the key group of 14- to 25-year-olds participation in cycling has dropped by 25% over the past decade. But British Cycling did deliver the main thing UK Sport asked of it: in that same time British cyclists won 101 Olympic and Paralympic medals.
They became the epitome of British sporting culture that has just cut all public funding from wheelchair rugby because the team could finish only fifth at the Paralympic Games. As the cycling report puts it, “the successful pursuit of medals has had a ‘blinding effect’”. Which taps into wider questions about whether we expect, or will accept, success at any cost. It is interesting Stuart Lancaster was one of the people behind the report. Lancaster spent four years overhauling the culture of the England rugby team. He taught them to be “a band of brothers”, to be “humble and to respect each other and everyone else”, made them listen to lectures on the history of the team, had them play in shirts emblazoned with the Victoria Cross and walk through the crowd at Twickenham. And at the end of it all England were knocked out in the opening round of their own World Cup.
Brailsford and Sutton delivered the success everyone wanted from them by pushing their methods to the limit of what is acceptable and beyond. So it goes. Sutton would not be the first coach to bully his athletes or Brailsford the only one to play the dictator because he let the success swell his head. Only, back when Brailsford was slinging all those expensive platitudes about how “hard work is the steak and marginal gains are the peas”, that was not the story he was selling. And given how people gobbled it all up at the time, perhaps it was not the story we wanted to hear, either. British Cycling were not the only people blinded by all those medals.
