The Performance Mindset

STEP 5FOSTER YOUR CULTURE

Australia's swimming team made history at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics when it won more gold medals than any previous Australian Olympic swimming team. The Dolphins won 21 medals in Tokyo (including open water), nine of them gold. This was a far cry from the 2012 London Olympics where Australia had its worst swimming team performance, with 10 medals overall and only the women's 4x100 relay team winning gold. The performance raises curiosity about the team's rise at Tokyo.

Culture in practice

When Rohan Taylor was appointed as head coach, replacing Jacco Verhaeren, his clear focus was to continue an overt and very deliberate culture build. Rohan had discussed this with Jacco in the transition to his 2020 appointment, in the midst of the COVID pandemic and only 12 months before Tokyo was scheduled to take place. ‘From my experience in a previous role as head coach at Nunawading Swimming Club in Melbourne, I knew the importance of culture,’ he told me when I interviewed him after Tokyo. ‘I took lessons I learned from there to the Dolphins.

‘To begin with I looked back to London, when the team's culture had been labelled poor. So I asked myself, what is culture? I see it as a living environment. What people see, feel and hear. It's the collective behaviours of people. I realised that historically there had been a focus on values, but not on behaviour. In London there were also a lot of silos due to an overemphasis on independence.’

Rohan emphasised three ...