Elite Team Talks

By Elite Team ScalersBusiness Management

Elite Team Talks episodes

March 06, 2024 Episode 7: The Art & Science of World-Class Teams with Duncan French (Vice President of Performance, UFC)
Following a career spanning three Olympic games with Team GB, and several leadership roles within collegiate and professional US sport, Duncan French became the inaugural Vice President of Performance for the UFC when they founded the world-famous UFC Performance Institute in 2017.

Since then, the team has grown into a global, multi-cultural
entity, with recent performance institutes opened in Mexico City and Shanghai. The team are now recognised as a world-leading authority on human performance, with Duncan leading the charge.

You can expect to understand;

• How to build an innovative culture that breaks status quo
• How to create an environment that breeds high performance
• How to identify the right qualities for an industry-leading team
• And how to create a culture that's admired by some of the world's best teams

PS. we experienced a few sound issues during the first 5
minutes, but it’s smooth sailing after that - and packed full of insight we hope you agree.

00:00 Intro
00:59 Diversity and depth of experience
04:09 Science and art in building world-class teams
09:37 Successfully challenging status quo
14:00 Riding the rollercoaster of success & failure
16:38 How Duncan reverse engineers success
24:18 Creating an industry-leading team & culture
35:26 How Duncan identifies the right people
44:07 Connecting a global, multi-cultural team
50:47 The 3 things people need to thrive
53:05 Reframing COVID as an opportunity
58:20 Prospect theory & leaning into risk
1:03:02 How to innovate with minimal time
1:07:30 The cost of leadership and loneliness
1:11:05 Stepping into roles you’re not ready for
1:14:35 Developing a network of peers
1:17:00 The advice he’d give to himself and others
1:21:50 How Duncan’s evolved as a leader
1:23:00 Word association
1:25:01 Three takeaways & action points
1 hr 29 min
January 17, 2024 Episode 6: Identity Eats Culture For Breakfast with Dr Ben Rosenblatt (England Football)
Welcome back. Our guest today is Dr Ben Rosenblatt.
Ben has coached athletes to every Olympic Games since 2008, worked in Olympic gold medal winning teams and for the last seven years, led England football’s physical performance department as part of Gareth Southgate’s backroom team
Most recently, he founded his own company, 292 performance, who provide high-performance support to high-performing individuals.
In this episode, we discuss;
- The 5 necessities for a high performing team
- How Gareth Southgate’s leadership team successfully engineered culture change
- His most memorable moments with the England Football team
- Why, in his opinion, identity eats culture for breakfast
You can expect to understand;
- How to deeply motivate your people
- How to successfully lead culture change
- How to use failure as a competitive advantage
- And how to create sustainable, high performance
As always, if you enjoyed the episode and want to be the first to hear when new episodes drop, please like, rate, review and subscribe to the podcast.
Most importantly, thank you for watching and listening. This podcast was created for you, and I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00 Podcast intro
00:51 Guest intro
01:42 Ben’s story
04:30 What attracted him
05:33 His ‘why’
06:28 Art vs science
10:06 Advice for new leaders
16:37 Winning Olympic gold
19:03 Importance of celebrating success
19:36 Integrating your vision, values and behaviours
21:08 Decentralised leadership & ownership
24:42 Importance of living your values
27:10 Owen Eastwood’s book ‘Belonging’
27:30 Storytelling over slogans
29:07 Identity eats culture for breakfast
29:52 Pink inflatable unicorns & EAST
34:00 Gamifying development
34:43 5 necessities for high performing teams
39:00 Understanding your team’s needs
40:46 Best moments with England
43:03 Importance of small wins
46:00 First step in turning the ship around
48:28 Importance of awareness and desire for change
50:03 What underpins team’s actions
51:00 Successfully challenging status quo
54:44 The COM-B model of behaviour change
58:00 The issue with culture
58:50 The culture change trade-off
1:00:12 Aligning your mission & values with your identity
1:04:20 Detaching yourself from the outcome
1:07:16 Traits of the world’s best athletes
1:09:17 Mindfulness for sustainable success
1:13:20 Opportunity vs threat mindset
1:16:00 Traits of the world’s best leaders
1:16:58 Hiring vs developing mindset
1:21:23 Word association
1:23:45 Summary & insights
1:36:58 3 key takeaways
1 hr 39 min
November 29, 2023 Episode 3: How To Continually Perform At Your Best with Dr Scott Drawer (Team GB, Team Sky & Millfield)
Welcome back. In today’s episode and part two of my chat with Scott, we discuss the similarities between high pressure boardrooms and preparing for the Tour de France.
Scott breaks down the misconceptions around the phrase ‘marginal gains’, what it takes to repeatedly perform at the highest level under pressure and how to rediscover your innate, child-like curiosity within.

You can expect to understand;
- How to adapt and evolve quicker than the competition
- How to create a deep sense of connection in your company
- And how to repeatedly perform at your best

As always, if you enjoy the episode and want to be the first to hear when new
episodes drop, please like, rate, review and subscribe to the podcast.

Thanks for listening and enjoy.

(0:00) Podcast intro
(0:50) Guest intro
(01:39) Chasing the Tour De France
(2:25) Demystifying marginal gains
(04:47) The keys to high performance organisations
(05:13) Is ‘winning’ enough?
(07:26) Sustainable high performance
(08:36) The importance of change
(10:41) Creating connection & belonging
(12:39) Healthy high performance
(14:55) A ‘whole person’ approach
(18:34) The shared responsibility of recovery
(20:50) Understanding your own needs
(21:20) Structuring rest & recovery
(22:14) Creating a culture which values recovery
(25:39) Word association
(26:54) Episode takeaways
(28:53) 3 action points (screenshot)
(30:27) Coming up next
32 min
November 16, 2023 Episode 2: Innovate Like Team GB with Dr Scott Drawer (Team GB, Team Sky & Millfield)
Over the last 20 years, Scott has led human performance departments across some of the most elite sports organisations in the world.
He was Head of Research and Innovation for Team GB over 5 Olympic cycles, led England Rugby’s Player Development Pathway, headed up Team Sky’s Performance Hub with the job title ‘Imagineer’ in the Tour De France & now, as Director of Sport at Millfield, is building a team responsible for inspiring a generation at the leading sports school in the country.
Over the last two decades, Scott’s roles in research and innovation required him to look outside the traditional confines of sport. And much like this podcast, involved him bringing together some of the greatest thinkers across sport, science, business and the arts to discover new breakthroughs and explore human potential from different perspectives.
He holds a PhD in Sport Science, has published 36 research papers, but most importantly, he manages to maintain the same child-like curiosity and energy for innovation and unlocking talent as he did 20 years ago.
In today’s episode we discuss innovation and it’s precursors; curiosity and creativity.
Scott explains his journey, the startup-like atmosphere when he joined Team Sky and what he attributes his high level of curiosity.
We talk about how in the infinite game of business, where you can’t win or lose but simply get ahead or fall behind, the goal is actually to out-innovate the competition.
And Scott explains the 2-3 most crucial components for companies and teams to achieve this.

You can expect to understand;
- The essential components for innovation
- How to do it better than your competition
- How to reframe risk for next-level innovation
- The inner-workings of British Cycling’s famous ‘secret-squirrel club’

As always, if you enjoyed this episode please like, rate, subscribe, leave a review and share it with others.

Thanks for listening and enjoy.

(0:00) Podcast intro
(0:50) Guest intro
(3:01) Scott’s journey
(6:03) What led Scott down this path?
(9:17) The risk-curiosity relationship
(10:59) Depth vs diversity of experience
(12:16) British Cycling’s ‘secret squirrel club’
(13:50) Scott Barry Kauffman’s research on creativity (video = ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCzr7RCBigA⁠) (paper = ⁠https://scottbarrykaufman.com///wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Oleynick-et-al.-2017.pdf⁠)
(14:39) Build a diverse toolbox
(15:57) Conducting an orchestra
(17:07) Mid-episode summary
(17:38) Startup mentality
(18:49) Sweet-spot alignment
(19:25) The importance of constraints
(20:12) The only sustainable competitive advantage
(20:41) The Red Queen Effect
(21:20) How to measure innovation?
(23:38) The resources-innovation paradox
(25:40) 3 measures of an individual’s innovation potential
(27:49) 3 measures of an organisation’s innovation potential
(30:41) 2 biggest learnings from 5 Olympics
(35:49) Episode takeaways
(38:03) 3 action points (screenshot)
(38:58) Coming up next
41 min
November 16, 2023 Episode 1: Our Origin Story with Henry Cheetham MSc (Founder of Elite Human Solutions)
Hi everyone, I’m excited to officially welcome you to the Elite Team Talks podcast. I’m Henry Cheetham, your host and the founder of Elite Human Solutions.
Firstly, thanks for joining us, and today, I’ll be sharing the story of how the Elite Team Talks podcast came to be.
To provide you with a more interesting experience over the next ten minutes, here’s an illustration of our origin story.
If you are excited to hear from the best teams in the world, make sure to like and subscribe to the podcast to be the first to hear when new episodes drop.
So without further ado, here is our origin story. I hope you enjoy.
(00:00) Podcast intro
(00:50) Episode intro
(01:27) Our origin story
(11:25) Episode outro
(11:35) Coming up next
13 min

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