Sammy Burt
On Wednesday 25th November we hosted our first Fp event and we were overwhelmed to have had a whopping 85 people join us from around the globe. We hope those of you who attended found the panel’s discussion as interesting as we did and valued their openness and honesty.
Tarquin McDonald, CEO of Bath Rugby spoke of the need to “hold things lightly – small or significant, just hold it gently. It creates the space in which trust, vulnerability and openness can show its face despite all that is going on around you.” We thought it was particularly interesting when an attendee asked how the club will maintain the great behaviours that have emerged this year and not return to old habits.
Stuart Hooper, Director of Rugby at Bath talked to this point and said that it is a hard one. The players, coaches, conditioners etc have been doing things the old way for so long. Players are told what to eat, when to eat, how to train, sleep etc – but in lockdown they had to take responsibility for their own fittest and they came back fitter than they had ever been so its key that responsibility isn’t taken away from them. “We’re working on it!”
Stuart said “I’ve been the ‘boss’ that stands at the front and beats their chest but now I’m a leader alongside the team, in it and asking them for support as much as I want them to ask it of me.” Lynne Fernquest CEO of Bath Rugby Foundation shared how they “lost sight of £250k over night, so we divided our team into a survival team, keeping us in business, and a revival team which brought 40+ charities locally together to work out how we weren’t going to drop the people we each support. We were totally open.” She continued later that “We don’t want to go back to our silos – because we’re better together!” “The faster you can learn to adapt the more likely you are to succeed. So what do you hold and what do you let go when you adapt? At Bath we held on to our principles and our integrity, we let go of hierarchy.” Tarquin on how to survive disruption.
More about Farleigh Performance
The newly formed consultancy is designed to develop business as a ‘force for good’ and to place learning at the heart of sustaining organisational success.
Farleigh Performance will support local, national and international clients to create value from today’s challenges, while producing lasting improvements in team and organisational performance. The partnership with Bath Rugby brings together it’s deep understanding of human performance, its well-established learning practices and its elite training environment at Farleigh House; with the research and experience of Graham Abbey, who has spent his 30-year career working in and with organisations undergoing transformation.
The Covid-19 pandemic has underlined the need to build collaborative, resilient and agile organisations and it is this important work that sits at the core of Farleigh Performance. The new consultancy will create programmes and spaces for business, sport and charities, as well as Public Sector organisations, to innovate and collaborate in solving their most complex issues while building lasting purposeful performance.
Tarquin McDonald, Bath Rugby Chief Executive and Farleigh Performance Founding Director, said “In essence, I believe that learning will be the engine of our success. Passion, expertise, hard-work, competitiveness, talent; these all go without saying but nurturing an environment of deep trust, connection, purpose and agility will enable us to thrive.
The Farleigh Performance joint venture is about embedding this into our systems at the Club and accelerating the journey of our future performance and success. Farleigh Performance will not only make a significant difference to the businesses it works with, but also to Bath Rugby’s sustained success both on and off the field.”
Graham Abbey, Farleigh Performance Chief Executive and Founding Director, commented “We have all been experiencing the profound uncertainty and complexity of our world this year. In times of disruption inequality is polarised – many of those with resources prosper and those without find themselves simply struggling to survive. We are working to help organisations and their people thrive whatever happens, by combining a deep understanding of organisational psychology with the unique insights into individual and team performance that professional sport offers. Together we can make purposeful performance commonplace.”
Farleigh Performance has been working with clients such as The Dyson Institute, Devro Plc, and Sport England since its soft-launch earlier this year.