Hi Reader
An otherwise quiet Tuesday morning and a sporting director client name came up on my phone screen.
No hanging about. Straight to business.
"Remember that player development pathway we spent three months designing? It's dead."
"Ok….What happened?" I asked.
"Nothing happened. That's the problem. It never really made it past the f%$king PowerPoint."
I wasn't all that surprised. It was kind of predictable.
Last week, I revealed how top sports clubs/organisations lose 63% of leadership decisions before they reach implementation. I shared tools to measure your own "Transmission Efficiency" (the hidden metric that predicts leadership sustainability.)
The response floored me. 20+ readers ran the diagnostic and messaged with variations of: "My score was worse than I thought…..now what?"
So let’s follow up. Today, I'm sharing the exact method one top level sporting director used to boost his club's transmission efficiency from 32% to 68% in just six weeks.
For simplicity, I call it “Decision Vaccination”.
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Why Your Decisions Die a Silent Death
When you release a decision into your club/organisation, it faces organisational & political antibodies designed to kill it.
These aren't just the obvious ones like resistance. They're the silent killers e.g. competing priorities, casual misinterpretation, personal agendas and good old-fashioned forgetting.
Your strategy doesn't fail because it's flawed. It fails because it lacks immunity to survive the transmission journey.
Forget "change management" or "getting buy-in". Those approaches treat symptoms after the disease has spread.
Decision Vaccination builds immunity from the start. It's preventive, not reactive.
The Six-Week Vaccination Protocol
The sporting director I mentioned faced a brutal truth: only one-third of his leadership team's decisions were being implemented as intended.
We rolled out a six-week protocol that transformed his transmission effectiveness:
Week 1: Decision Autopsy
The Action: Pick three recent decisions that died during implementation. Trace their journey without pointing fingers.
The Method: Ask people at each transmission point:
- "What did you understand the decision to be?"
- "What stopped you from implementing it exactly as intended?"
What We Found: The director discovered that 80% of transmission failures happened not because people disagreed with decisions, but because they genuinely misunderstood them.
The first handoff (from leadership team to department heads) created subtle distortions that snowballed with the next handoff…and so on.
Week 2: Transmission Mapping
The Action: Map how decisions actually flow through your club – not how the org chart says they should.
The Method: Track your three most important current initiatives. Document each:
- Handoff point (who passes information to whom)
- Medium (meeting, email, hallway conversation)
- Context (what else was competing for attention)
What We Found: The director was stunned to discover that crucial performance philosophy decisions were being transmitted during hurried 15-minute pre-training chats. Box ticked. But these vital strategic conversations were competing with more immediate daily & immediate concerns.
No wonder strategic decisions were getting lost in the noise.
Week 3: Decision Simplification
The Action: Redesign decision communication using what I call the "Stranger Test" i.e. Would someone with no background understand exactly what's required?
The Method:
- Distill each decision to one clear sentence
- Create a visual that captures the core concept
- Attach a real example of what success looks like
- Strip away all qualifiers and nuance from the core directive
What We Found: The director rewrote their player development principles from a detailed 22-page document to 5 clear directives with visual anchors (it’s pretty easy now to get online assistance with graphics etc). Immediate transmission accuracy jumped to 92%.
Week 4: Context Preservation
The Action: Create decision packages that keep the "why" attached to the "what."
The Method: For each key decision, capture:
- The problem being solved (in plain language)
- The options considered and rejected (and why)
- How you'll measure success
- What's fixed versus what's flexible
What We Found: When people understood exactly why certain approaches were rejected, they stopped trying to reintroduce them during implementation.
Week 5: Transmission Reduction
The Action: Cut the number of handoffs between decision makers and implementers.
The Method:
- Map the current transmission pathway
- Eliminate unnecessary middlemen
- Create direct connections to key implementers
- Standardise decision communications.
What We Found: The director began including academy coaches in specific leadership meetings rather than having decisions flow through three layers of management. Understanding & Implementation levels soared.
Week 6: Decision Monitoring
The Action: Implement real-time transmission checks.
The Method:
- After each major decision, randomly test understanding at different levels
- Score transmission accuracy on a simple 0-5 scale
- Fix distortions immediately before they spread
- Celebrate when transmission works perfectly
What We Found: The club discovered that checking understanding within 48 hours of communicating decisions reduced implementation failure by nearly half.
The Real-World Impact
Six weeks after implementing this protocol, the sporting director's club showed measurable changes:
- Decision transmission efficiency doubled to 68%
- Implementation time for strategic initiatives dropped by 40%
- Leadership meetings shortened by 33%
- Staff reported 30% higher clarity on direction
But the real payoff came nine months later.
While other clubs saw typical leadership turnover during & after a tough season, his leadership team stayed intact. And with expanded responsibilities.
The board's assessment? "For the first time, we can see the direct line between leadership decisions and on-field execution."
Your First Vaccination Step
The full protocol requires commitment. It’s simple, not easy. But you can start today:
- Pick one critical decision you're about to release
-
Create a mini-vaccine containing:
- One-sentence directive
- Visual representation
- Example of successful implementation
- Clear context (the why)
- Cut transmission hops by communicating directly with implementers
- Check understanding 48 hours after communication
Then watch what happens to implementation compared to your normal approach.
Working alongside performance leaders across sport, I've seen this method transform not just implementation but leadership longevity.
Solid implementation saves careers; in fact, it differentiates & distinguishes them.
Clubs with high ‘Transmission Efficiency’ keep their leadership talent because they’ve created something rare: an environment where decisions actually happen.
As my client told me: "I used to think leadership was about making smart decisions. Now I see that’s only step one; it's about protecting decisions from dying in transmission."
Coming in the next edition: Many of you asked about handling resistance even when decisions are clearly transmitted. Next week, we’ll look at the "Resistance Mapping" technique that separates four types of organisational pushback….and how to handle each one differently.
Very last thing...would you be able to help me? This newsletter takes 4-5 hours to pull together. Could you take 10 seconds and send it to a colleague or friend who would be interested or could benefit? Thanks in advance.
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Thank you for being part of the Leaders Coach community.
The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone.
But you don't have to do it on your own.
Onward and Upward,
Paul Clarke
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