Develop the People Who Set the Standard

01Purpose of This Document

This document sets out a practical pathway for any elite sport organisation that wants to extend the rigour it applies to athletes to the staff who support them. It draws on the evidence gathered in The Team Behind the Team and translates that evidence into a set of approaches that run from changes a department can make with its existing resources through to a dedicated leadership role, so each organisation can choose a starting point that fits its scale, budget and ambition.

ST Performance Global has developed and evidenced these approaches through two decades of embedded work across professional rugby union and baseball, with the document intended as a steering tool for leadership conversations about where to begin.

02The Need

Elite organisations have built sophisticated systems for tracking what matters in their athletes, from load and readiness to sleep and recovery, responding with precision whenever an indicator moves the wrong way. Workloads are adjusted, programmes are modified and long term durability is protected without giving up short term output, which reflects a deliberate investment in the science of how people absorb stress and adapt.

The principles behind those systems apply with equal force to the coaches delivering instruction, the clinicians managing return to play, the analysts making evaluations and the leaders making decisions across a season. Very few organisations measure or manage the readiness of those people with any consistency, which leaves a performance gap that sits upstream of every athlete outcome the organisation cares about.

The foundational principle

When Minor League Baseball ratified its first collective agreement for minor league players in 2023, minimum salaries rose substantially and housing became mandatory, removing barriers that had drawn attention away from development. With those barriers gone and new support structures in place, players could give far more of their focus to the work that improves them. This document applies the same lens one layer out, to the staff wrapped around the player system, because every improvement in their environment multiplies the environment and support each player receives.

03The Evidence in Brief

The companion article sets out the evidence in full, while the table below summarises the findings that carry the most weight for this document alongside the implication each one holds for the design of a performance department.

04Precedent

Organisations across sport have already moved in this direction through three models, which this document ranks by how reliably they deliver the conditions set out in the companion article. The ultimate model is a hybrid lead that combines an organisational audit, a driving philosophy and a targeted role at performance level connected to people and culture. The second is a dedicated staff development role inside the club, while the third is a system held by everyone that becomes the strongest of all once the culture to support it exists.

Model one: the hybrid lead

McLaren Racing advertised this model in 2026 with a Head of People Engineering for its endurance racing and business performance functions, a Woking based role that partners around 200 staff as a trusted strategic partner to their leaders. McLaren is explicit that the role sits outside traditional HR, describing it as hands on collaboration and people engineering that connects people initiatives directly to car performance. It invites candidates from performance psychology, coaching and sport based people development. Its brief spans organisational design, change, workforce planning and talent management, all delivered through a local people plan built on stakeholder engagement and without a team of direct reports to manage.

Model two: a dedicated development role

The second best option is the dedicated staff development role. A 2026 ST Performance Global benchmark of roughly 150 clubs across the five major North American leagues identified six club roles built specifically to recruit, develop and retain the staff who surround the players, with the Arizona Cardinals the only one at vice president level.

These roles sit in one of two homes, with the Cardinals, Titans and Packers anchoring the function in the people or business side of the club while the Celtics, Rays and Pirates build it inside basketball or baseball operations. Roles anchored in the people function bring the methods of organisational development although they rarely reach coaches and performance staff in season, whereas roles anchored in the sporting department reach those staff daily without always carrying tools such as succession planning or programme evaluation. The Packers role, created in 2023 to lead learning and development for staff, also shows how exposed the function becomes when it depends on one person, since it lasted two seasons before its holder moved on with no successor publicly confirmed. None of the six yet combines both homes, which is the combination the hybrid model is built around.

Model three: a system held by everyone

The shared model is in many ways the strongest, because a standard held by every coach, practitioner and manager is far harder to lose than one held by a single appointment. Its limitation lies in the starting point, since it relies on a cultural norm that many organisations do not yet have and that never appears simply because it has been identified, stated and encouraged. The organisations below show the model working where that culture already existed or was deliberately rebuilt.

05Approaches From Partial to Full

The five approaches below run from the lightest touch to the most complete commitment, with each designed so it can stand alone or be combined with the others in whatever sequence suits the organisation. The first three build the shared model into the existing system, the fourth brings in hybrid leadership capacity on a fractional basis and the fifth establishes the hybrid lead as a permanent role, which is the ultimate expression of this work.

06Comparing the Approaches

The table below sets the five approaches side by side so a leadership group can weigh scope, investment and speed against what each option requires of the organisation. Relative investment is described in broad terms because the real figure depends on the size of the staff group, the number of sites involved and the partners chosen.

The approaches are cumulative in practice, since the rhythm in the first approach gives any monitoring system something to act on and gives any leadership role a foundation to build from. They also mirror the ranking in the precedent section, with the hybrid lead as the ultimate destination and the earlier approaches building the conditions that allow it to succeed.

07Guardrails

Staff performance support only works when staff trust it, so several principles should hold regardless of the approach chosen. Participation in any monitoring should be voluntary and based on informed consent, with individual data belonging to the individual and leadership reporting anonymised at a level that protects identities. Staff should also be able to leave any monitoring programme at any point without explanation or consequence.

The work should sit alongside existing clinical and wellbeing services and refer into them where needed, since performance support and clinical care serve different purposes. Measures should be used to improve the environment around staff and never to evaluate or discipline individuals, because the moment data is used against people the honesty that makes it valuable disappears. Clear communication about how data will be used and the ways it will never be used should come before any programme begins. Whichever approach is chosen, the work should also be embedded in structures and shared measures that outlast any individual appointment, since the benchmark shows how quickly a function built around one person can disappear.

A hybrid lead also needs protection from drifting into routine administration, because the value of the role lies in its reach into the performance environment. Keeping it close to coaches, clinicians and analysts during the season and measuring it against performance outcomes is what stops it becoming a conventional people role under a different title. Its independence from any single department matters as well, since the role must be able to raise uncomfortable findings from the audit without those findings being filtered on their way to the leadership group.

08Measuring Progress

Each approach should be judged against a small set of measures agreed at the outset and reviewed at the close of each major phase of the year, since a short set that is reviewed consistently is worth far more than a long list that nobody has time to discuss. The indicators below combine people measures with performance measures so the leadership group can see the effect on staff and on the athletes they support in the same review. Where a hybrid lead is in place these measures become the core of how that role is judged, keeping it anchored to performance in the same way every other investment in the programme is assessed.

09A Sensible Sequence

Most organisations will be best served by starting with the staff performance rhythm in the first ninety days, since it costs little and builds the baseline every other option depends on. A readiness pilot or an embedded system can then be added for the next competitive phase, with a formal review at around six months to judge what the data and the pulse measures are showing. That review is the natural point to decide whether the organisation needs dedicated leadership capacity and whether a fractional lead or a permanent head of people performance would best fit its scale and ambition. Keeping each stage short and reviewed also allows the leadership group to adjust course quickly if early results point in a different direction.

For organisations that decide the hybrid lead is the right destination, a fractional lead can carry out the organisational audit, articulate the driving philosophy and shape the permanent role before it is recruited. That sequence means the permanent appointment arrives into an environment that already understands its purpose, which gives the role the best possible chance of lasting beyond any one person who holds it. The same review points then continue once the role is in place, so the leadership group can see whether the investment is delivering what the audit said it should.

10How ST Performance Can Support This

ST Performance Global works with organisations at whichever point on this pathway makes sense for them. That support can take the form of a diagnostic review of the current environment, the design and facilitation of the staff performance rhythm, guidance on selecting and integrating monitoring or embedded systems, a fractional organisational growth lead or help scoping and recruiting a permanent head of people performance. The shape of that support is always agreed with the leadership group first, so it matches the pace and priorities of the organisation.

Every engagement is built on the three values that guide the practice, People First, Meaning Over Status and Rigour is Respect, with each one designed to leave the organisation more capable and less dependent on outside support than it was when the work began.

Most engagements begin with a short diagnostic phase that combines conversations with staff at every level, a review of the calendar and existing structures and a set of agreed measures, which gives the leadership group an honest picture of where the organisation currently stands before any investment decision is made. From there the work follows whichever approach the leadership group chooses, with the same measures used throughout so progress can be judged consistently. Every approach in this document is also written so that an organisation can pursue it independently if it prefers, with ST Performance available at whatever level of involvement proves useful.

11Questions to Guide the Decision

A steering document is most useful when it sharpens the conversation a leadership group needs to have, so the questions below are offered as a starting point for that discussion. They work best when the answers are tested against the experience of staff at every site and level of the department, since the view from the leadership table and the view from a satellite site can differ considerably.