Video Transcript: Women in High Performance Leadership

Spotlighting women for have been the ‘bright spots’ in HP Leadership in Australia.

Leaders: Anne Marie Harrison, ex-Victorian Institute of Sport CEO;  Matti Clements, Executive General Manager of AIS Performance, Kim Crane, CEO, Paddle Australia.

Other speakers: Bill Tait, General Manager, Performance Systems and Paralympic Pathways, AIS.

00:01 Anne Marie Harrison

If I think about the early days of my career, I don't remember female coaches being an issue. I saw plenty of them and then for whatever happened that, and I genuinely don't know the answer to this, it became more difficult and we did find ourselves in a situation where our coaching population doesn't represent the Australian population.

00:25 Anne Marie Harrison

Fortunately, we've kind of grabbed that problem and said we need to resolve it. We need to resolve it for everyone because a more diverse coaching population is better for the system and better for performances at all levels. It's equally as important at club land and at state association level for there to be great female coaches and a diversified coaching group as there is at the high performance area.

00:49 Matti Clements

I think one of the things I am most proud of is the entire industry signing their collective agreement to get behind the win -well strategy. On December the 15th, 2022, it is seared in my memory at the time. Probably I didn't realise how exciting it was until we got through it and I saw everyone standing up signing. It was pretty cool.

01:11 Kim Crane

One of the transformational change elements was ensuring that we had a really healthy thriving culture. So, Win Well was a real call out for me around being able to label exactly what it is that we're aspiring for. So that required some pretty courageous work for us, and you know our performance plan, our high performance strategic plan also really calls out the winning well culture.

01:37 Bill Tait

It'll be absolutely true to say that Anne Marie’s been probably my biggest professional mentor in my career. The strongest thing that I learned from Anne Marie is that it's important to be able to hold the space to maintain a hard line in terms of thinking about what needs to be delivered with the care and kindness to ensure that the people who were delivering it felt like they had the tools that they needed and the support to get on with it. And I think that that's Definitely a strong philosophy of mine, whether that was when I was coaching or certainly now into leadership and management.  I often think about those, the way that Anne Marie would approach a problem and try and apply it to a difficult context I might be facing at that time and often what I come back to is that clear is kind and trying to make sure that at the end of the day we're really focused on supporting the individual to be and get the best out of the situation. –

02:32 Matti Clements

My husband is a coach here. The fact that he, during school holidays, has had the children at training, that environment that has been set up by Anne Marie's leader, that actually we're a family, that infiltrates through the industry because the athletes saw a male there looking after his two 13 -year -old daughters, still running the program, program etc and explaining that that's happening because I'm away for my work that infiltrates the industry so the athletes see there's a whole heap of different ways to be part of this industry. The broader impact is that we can all benefit from that.

03:10 Bill Tait

Once we get to the point of critical mass then change happens and I think that's what we've seen in the high -performance sport system as it relates to opening and creating much much better small supported pathways for women. At the end of the day when everybody feels as though they're benefiting from improvement in culture and improvement in voice then I think it's very easy for a team approach to be adopted and for everyone to embrace that just as the norm and we are heading towards a point where I think it will just be an ordinary part of the everyday, day -to -day business as usual in our system.

03:45 Kim Crane

I think in the context of when I was leading the high performance program, what the Win Well strategy really appealed to me was not only just the messaging, but the methodology about how we actually got there was a fairly ambitious process by bringing all the stakeholders and all the games partners to really have a call to action for actually increasing our aspiration for how we worked as a system.

04:10 Anne Marie

It's an old phrase but the culture is a product of the people that lead the organisation. You do have to lead with a sense of empathy and understanding and ensuring that people feel valued and appreciated and have a role to play, irrespective of what it is in the organisation, but you equally have to make tough decisions and you have to show leadership that people feel confident and comfortable that the organisation has a strategy, it's adhering to that strategy and it's putting in place the things that will enable it to achieve the strategy.

04:42 Matti Clements

We've got a great opportunity now and there has been a huge amount of work done already but we have an opportunity now as a country to say we believe coaching is critical to our sustainable performance and I think we've always known that, but we've called it out in the Win Well strategy and coaches are an enabler in that strategy.

04:59 Matti Clements

So, in order to do that, we need to change. We need to think about how do we make it an industry that female coaches want to be part of and feel like they can contribute to. Because we also know that that will value add for the athlete's performance, leadership, etc. So, the value add of having diversity in coaching and absolutely the focus of having female coaches is important, but the broader impact is that we can all benefit from that.