Hi Reader
Your club makes hundreds, maybe thousands, of decisions each year.
Most of them never happen.
At least, not in the way you intended.
I watched it unfold recently. A Championship club's leadership team carefully crafted their player development strategy over three intensive, off-site days. Six weeks later, when I visited their academy, the coaches were implementing something entirely different.
It wasn’t because they were rebellious. They genuinely thought they were following the plan.
Sadly, this isn't rare. It's the norm.
After studying decision execution across 40+ elite sports clubs, I've found the average "Transmission Efficiency" hovers just shy of 40%.
That means nearly two-thirds of leadership intent gets lost or distorted before reaching the point of action.
Concerning? Yes.
But here's what should scare you: The clubs and organisations with the lowest transmission efficiency also have the highest leadership turnover.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
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Why Smart Leaders Get Fired For Dumb Reasons
When leadership decisions don't translate into consistent action, most clubs blame the wrong things:
🙅♂️ "Our people aren't aligned"
🤝🏻 "We need more buy-in"
🛑 "There's resistance to change"
But these aren't root causes. They're symptoms.
The real problem? Decision Transmission Failure.
One executive I worked with discovered this the hard way. After being made surprisingly redundant (despite excellent strategic vision), it dawned on him: "My ideas were good. But they never survived the journey from boardroom to pitch."
Measuring Your Decision Transmission Efficiency
Most leaders have no idea how well their decisions transmit through their club/organisation. Here are three practical tools to help you measure it:
1. The Three-Level Test
How it works: Select a recent significant decision. Then interview three people at different levels of your club:
- Someone who was in the room when the decision was made
- Someone who reports to that person
- Someone who works at the front line
Ask each: "What was decided; Why was it decided; and what specific actions should change as a result?"
Compare their answers. The consistency between them is your qualitative transmission score.
One Eredivisie sporting director was shocked when this exercise revealed his carefully crafted player acquisition philosophy had morphed into something unrecognisable by the time it reached scouts.
The gap wasn't from resistance. It was from distortion through transmission.
2. The Decision Decay Calculator
How it works: Track the implementation of 10 recent decisions using this formula:
Transmission Efficiency = (Actions Implemented as Intended ÷ Actions Directed) × 100%
One club I advised discovered their efficiency was just 28%. This meant they were effectively throwing away 72 cents of every dollar of leadership effort.
The shocking part? They had no idea until they measured it.
3. The Retelling Exercise
How it works: At your next leadership meeting, have everyone write down their understanding of the three most important decisions from the previous meeting.
Compare notes. Score 1 point for each person who has the same understanding, 0 for different interpretations.
Then average the scores. Yes, it’s not empirical…but it is indicative and illuminating.
Anything below 0.8 indicates serious transmission problems.
A Scottish rugby club used this method and discovered their transmission score was 0.4. What made it worse was that this was even among people who had been in the same room when decisions were made.
It’s little wonder that, in their own words, their field-level execution was “inconsistent”.
The Four Horsemen of Decision Death
After analysing many transmission failures, I've identified four primary killers that reliably point towards leadership collapse:
1. Ambiguity Through Complexity
Leaders often believe comprehensive explanations create clarity. The opposite is true.
Each extra word, concept, or nuance exponentially increases the potential for misinterpretation as the decision travels.
A motorsport team boss I shared this with tested this by simplifying his technical directives from multi-page documents to single-sentence instructions with visual supports.
Their self-reported Transmission Efficiency jumped from 43% to 87% within one performance rotation.
2. Context Stripping
Decisions make perfect sense in the room where all the background, insights, and reasoning are present. But as they travel, this context melts away.
What remains is a naked directive with no supporting rationale. And in that vacuum it becomes easy to misinterpret or dismiss.
One football manager solved this by creating "decision packages". These took the form of single-page documents capturing not just what was decided, but why. They also captured what was rejected, and a clear vision of what success looks like.
3. Chinese Whispers Effect
Each transmission step can create degradation. A decision passing through five people before reaching its destination rarely resembles the original.
One football C-Suite mapped their decision pathways and discovered some critical instructions required nine transmission steps. By redesigning this circuitous structure they reduced this to three. In turn, implementation accuracy doubled.
4. Prioritisation Overload
When everything is important, nothing is. Most sports clubs are transmitting too many decisions simultaneously, creating bandwidth competition. Overload prevails. Signal is lost in noise.
A cricket Head-of-performance I advised reduced their strategic priorities from 12 to 3. Their transmission efficiency for those three jumped from 35% to 79% within just three months.
The Transmission Edge
The elite clubs I work with retain a certain cohesion; leadership tenure tends to exceed industry averages & they maintain transmission efficiency above 70%.
I don’t believe the correlation is a coincidence.
They don't achieve this, necessarily, by hiring better people or crafting far better strategies. They simply protect their decisions throughout the transmission journey.
What does that success look like? Here’s a few practical methods:
- Create Transmission-Ready Decisions: If it can't be stated in one sentence with absolute clarity, it's not ready to leave the war-room.
- Build Decision Amplifiers: Designate specific roles responsible for preserving decision integrity through the system.
- Establish Transmission Checkpoints: Create formal moments to verify that decisions remain intact as they travel.
- Reduce Decision Volume: Focus on fewer, high-impact decisions rather than a flood of minor ones.
On to You….Your Decision Transmission Audit
Before your next leadership meeting, try this:
- Select your 2-3 most important decisions from last month
- Ask people at different levels what they understood those decisions to be
- Calculate your current transmission efficiency
- Identify which of the ‘four horsemen’ is your primary killer
The insights you mine from the information will help you explain why achieving consistent results feels harder than it should.
Sustainable Legacy Leadership isn't about making brilliant decisions all the time. It's about ensuring those decisions maintain their integrity all the way to the point of action.
The leaders who last aren't necessarily the smartest.
But they do tend to be the ones whose decisions actually happen as intended.
Before jumping in what would you say your Transmission Efficiency score is?
The difference in your perception and reality could be interesting.
Last thing, a sporting director I worked with increased her club’s score from 32% to 69% in just six weeks. They used a technique I call "Decision Vaccination." I'll share exactly how it works in next week's newsletter.
Very last thing….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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A Master's Voice....
Change is challenging. For the person driving it and for those experiencing the disruption it brings.
What if you used a 'massage' approach rather than a 'sledgehammer' approach?
Would that work better? And have longer lasting, positive outcomes?
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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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