Transcript
DR MUSTAFA SARKAR
I guess, going back to your question around developing team resilience, some of the things that we’ve looked at is leadership, and leadership traditionally has been looking at just one individual that whether that’s the captain or the manager, providing a sense of vision or inspiration and charisma. But what we found, team resilience is the importance of sharing that leadership throughout the team.
So in particular, one of the research studies that we did was looking at the England 2003 England World Cup winning team, and Clive Woodward talked about the importance of a team to have an exceptional leader in a group of great leaders. So you need to have that figure-head, you need to have a captain or a coach who is going to provide that vision particularly when setbacks have happened but, at the same time, you need to be able to share that responsibility. So, for example, things like having a good leadership group so that when things go wrong people are more accountable and more people in the team are accountable and responsible for the team’s performance or the team’s outcome.
INTERVIEWER
And it’s interesting hearing about the relationships and that sense of connectedness and how important it is, and stepping up amongst leaders and it’s fascinating to see. In terms of sports, is there, you know, developing team resilience, are there different, you know, you mentioned sort of different qualities, does that vary across sport, then?
DR MUSTAFA SARKAR
Yeah, so, well, there is obviously going to be some contextual differences. In the study that we did, looking at kind of these resilient qualities, or these resilient characteristics, we looked at a variety of sports in elite sports, so professional Olympic sports, and the qualities we found seemed to be consistent across the variety of sports, so I am sure, as with all these things, there are probably going to be some contextual differences but, at the same time, we did identify a number of qualities that seem to be common across quite a few elite sport teams.