Inside Out Culture

Behaviours matter: what we can learn from the Marc Overmars football ban

• Inside Out Culture • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Former Dutch international footballer Marc Overmars was recently banned from all footballing activity for 12 months after being found to have behaved inappropriately towards female staff members at Ajax.

Is behaviour something that organisations (including sports teams) need to be explicit about? If so, how are they set within the culture?

On this episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast, we talk to the challenges that the sporting world faces in ensuring that 'safe' cultures exist through the behaviours of staff in all positions.

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Colin:

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture podcast, where we look at insights of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside. I'm Colin Ellis.

Cath:

And I'm Cath Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organisation, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.

Colin:

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think. Hello everybody, my name's Colin Ellis.

Cath:

And I'm Cath Bishop. Welcome to the Inside Out Culture podcast and in today's episode we're going to look at the world of sport and, to kick us off, we're going to take the recent story about Mark Overmars, who was given a worldwide football ban over inappropriate behaviour. Tell us a bit more about the story, Colin.

Colin:

Yeah, Cath, this is a story that emerged in February 2022. So a couple of years ago now from when we're recording when Overmars kind of quit. He was a technical director sorry, he was director of football at IACS in Holland and he quit because he'd been confronted by the club over inappropriate messages that he'd send to centre female members of staff. Now Overmars himself came out and said that he was ashamed of his behaviour, that he'd created. He said I didn't realise I was crossing the line with this, but it was made clear to me in recent days. Quoting from him here, he said I suddenly felt enormous pressure. I apologise, certainly for someone in my position.

Colin:

This behaviour is unacceptable. I see no other option but to leave IACS, which he promptly did, and then he promptly walked into another job with Royal Antwerp shortly after that, and so he was banned by the Dutch football authorities for two years, and the Dutch football authorities actually then asked FIFA to uphold that ban, to which Overmars appealed the ruling of that. But FIFA at the start of 2024, as we're recording this have upheld that and he will be banned from all football activities globally for the next 12 months, Cath. So that's where we're up to at this moment in time.

Cath:

So it's pretty drastic sort of thing we would not have seen just a few years ago. But it comes on the heels of a lot of stories, across a lot of sports, where culture is on the spotlight and where there's a shift in the standards of behaviour expected and the spotlight on those behaviours and, for the first time, the opportunity for people to speak out and say that's not OK, that's inappropriate, and this is a behaviour that is a core part of our culture. And yet often we haven't spoken about them, we haven't deliberately developed them. They've sort of just been happening all around us, but without us consciously optimising them and saying what's helpful and what's unhelpful about our behaviours. And so it becomes a new language almost, to understand behaviours, doesn't it?

Colin:

Yeah, it does, and I would agree, Cath. I think most of the stories that we've read about sports, and indeed most of the cultures that make it into the newspaper, behaviour tends to be the root cause, either the behaviour of an individual, a group of the behaviour of a group of individuals, or else the behaviour that's become normalised within a particular workplace. And I think there are a number of issues which we'll cover here, not least the fact that there's an assumption, I think, that people make when they walk into a workplace or as part of a culture, that, well, everybody knows how to behave, that people understand what's right, people understand what's wrong, which, of course, is not always true. I'd like to believe, you know, as someone who likes to see the good in people, that for the most part, people know how to treat each other respectfully, but that's not the case and certainly in my own experience as an employee, that's not always been the case is that people understand that actually, in 2024, as we're recording this, this is how you treat another human being?

Cath:

So it becomes something that in a way, was hidden, even though you can see behaviours everywhere. But now it becomes a topic where, if we're starting to give people year worldwide ban, clearly this matters, and so one of the things that I find leaders often ask in questions about and wanting support with is how do I do this how do I get new norms, how do I help everyone to understand them?

Cath:

Because clearly we don't all think the same things are acceptable and unacceptable, or we lose sight under pressure or we're distracted by something else.

Cath:

How can we actually start to ensure that we do operate at these highest standard of behaviors when previously we haven't written them down, we haven't talked about them, we don't have a shared language, and I find that that's a really rich area of coaching and supporting leaders to start to think about this, because one of the things you can't do is mandate behaviors, and, whilst you might say this is unacceptable, generally what we want to be doing most of the time is encouraging the right behaviors, positive behaviors, praising those, recognizing those, understanding which behaviors help us all to feel safe, to be able to thrive, to be able to perform under pressure as well, and so it's starting to think differently, isn't it? It's not something you can fix overnight either, which I think is frustrating that sense of can I just fix this next week and get the behavior sorted and then we can get back to our real jobs? No, no, no, this is part of the real job.

Colin:

Yeah, it's so frustrating, Cath, and I remember, as a junior manager, one of my very first managerial roles, I had someone who didn't pay particularly well and my manager kind of gave me a bit of a blueprint about how to deal with it, which I'll share in a second. But he said he said it's not going to happen overnight. This could take months, and I remember that feeling that I had as like, oh man, I'm going to have to keep going at this for month after month after month, and actually it did. It took about four months, from memory, to help an individual change their behavior, and I think one of the things that I learned really, really early on was that actually one of the strengths that you have as teams are, when I look and when I work with really great teams, one of the things that they do consistently well and one of the things that I encourage is that you actually take the time to build relationships between human beings.

Colin:

Fundamentally work, and it doesn't matter whether it's sport or whether you work in an office. It's about finding ways to work with other people in order to get the job done, plain and simple. But too often what we do is we see other people as roles. You fulfill this role, you help me, I help you, I work for you, you work for me, and we very rarely stop and say that someone's father, mother, sister, daughter, brother we don't actually see each other as human beings, and so one of the exercises that I run now is to actually build relationships between people. Now, it sounds like a fairly obvious thing to do. It's like well, of course we build relationships, but most people don't do it Deliberately. What they might do is organize some kind of Friday drinks or some kind of team building activity. They might camp in the woods or something like that. None of those things, by the way, are proven to work in the way that actually bringing people together and getting them to share information.

Colin:

Who are you? What kind of personality do you have? What are some things that come naturally to you? What are some things that struggle? What's a little bit of your history? And that's one of those. Vulnerability is one of those behaviors that we really value these days, and actually what vulnerability does is it opens a door and allows somebody in to sort of say I'm a human being, I'm here to do my job, and you start to see people differently, you start to think of people differently, and so you start to think about the impact the behaviors that you may demonstrate have on other people. And for me, that's the you know, when I think back to the advice that I got from my manager, and he was just like take the time to build a relationship with this person and help them to understand themselves, because often self-awareness tends to be the biggest challenge that we have.

Cath:

Yeah, I love that story. It was resonating with me on lots of levels. In my one of my careers as a diplomat working for the British Foreign Office, we spent a lot of time thinking about relationship building because it was our only currency to make change, to make things better, to improve. So we absolutely worked through relationships and what I loved about that world was we really prioritized that. We plotted them, we planned them, we put them on graphs, we tried to understand relationships. How can we build them and deepen them? And often I feel people tell me they're in a relationship business because actually most organizations are and whether it's lawyers or, you know, professional service firms or commercial firms, so to say we're a relationships business. But then the way they actually go about their work is they're executing tasks every day. They're not building relationships.

Cath:

The relationships squeeze round the edge and I think we really need to change that prioritization and be thinking what are the relationships that I'm going to build this week and through those I'm going to get some tasks done, rather than just this week is all about delivering tasks. No, I really encourage people to have daily, weekly, monthly goals that are around moving a relationship on. When I was going on my first posting as a very young diplomat enthusiastic, eager to learn what's going to help me do my craft well in a foreign country, and I was on my way to the beautiful capital city of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, about 10 years after the end of the Civil War there, and I had this conversation, this opportunity to talk to a very wise ambassador who'd worked for a long time in his career, been very successful at negotiations.

Cath:

And to get his advice tell me how do I do this job well? What do I need to know? What are the secrets? And I thought he might talk also about complex geopolitics and history. He didn't talk about any of that. He just focused on how you're going to connect with people in this country. And you're going to connect with everyone you meet. It doesn't matter what their role is, whether they're a taxi driver or the president of the country. You're going to learn through their perspective. If you open yourselves up to it and invite them to share their own views. You're going to learn more about the country through them, and you've got to connect with them Now.

Cath:

There might be all sorts of barriers linguistic, cultural, historical, political and your job is to keep finding ways over those. We said always think about the person you're talking to beyond the role. Put that to one side and then listen more than you speak and look for what you have in common. Start to build on that. Sometimes you've actually got opposing views, but it's about an issue you both care about. Well, that's enough, and I still use that. I still think about that in terms of how to build meaningful relationships with others, because actually life is about relationships, personally and professionally, and I think we would do help ourselves, both in our experience of work life but also in the jobs that we actually do, if we could really focus and plan. Think not about a set of tasks and meetings in the calendar, but all the people, all the relationships this week that we have the opportunity to deepen and broaden.

Colin:

Love that, Cath, I made a couple of notes as you were talking there. We're in a relationships business, but it's not about executing tasks and think of the person beyond the role Absolutely. And for me the segue back to sport is that by building those relationships, what we do is we strengthen the bonds between people and then, crucially, we can then have the conversation about, well, what's appropriate behavior for us within our context at this moment in time, and I do mean at this moment in time because the world continues to change every year. I think quite often when we see some of these and listen, kind of, we're using the Mark Overmore story as a kind of shoehorn into talk about behaviors. But of course, only fairly recently we had the Luis Ribliales case with Jenny Jamoso with the Spanish FAA, and those charges were vigorously defended by him. At the time he didn't feel that his behavior was inappropriate, even with Overmores himself. Even when the ban was handed down by FIFA, the Royal Antwerp players held a banner in the middle of the pitch supporting Overmores, despite his admission of the behavior that he demonstrated towards these women whose lives could be irreparably damaged by these things, by Overmores' actions.

Colin:

So I think that, having built those relationships. It's crucially important that there's a conversation, there's a conversation between the team to sort of say, well, how are we going to behave, what's the expectation of us, what's appropriate and what not? And again it feels a bit I don't know, polyana, to sort of say, oh, do we have to have this conversation? Do we have to have, do we have to make these agreements? It was like, well, yeah, because, coming back to how we started the episode, some people really don't know how to behave. The self-awareness is low. So, even though we may have built the relationship, we still need to actually agree on what's demanded of us at this point in time for us to collectively achieve the goal in the way that we'd like to achieve it.

Cath:

So I think there's also a really interesting power element that comes into this, because both the Rubiales case and the Mark Overmars case and if you think of things like the white review or the gymnastics in the UK or in fact, the gymnastics reviews that they've been across the globe, then it's actually often these situations where coaches with more power have somehow had a different standard for themselves or thought that doesn't apply to me, I can do something differently and I know from my own experience jumping into another career when I was in the Olympic wearing team then actually amongst us the behaviours were so crucial to building that trust and that sense of how we could push each other, challenge each other and really see each other at our absolute, kind of on the edge, in really raw moments.

Cath:

that built huge bonds but when you didn't see that same respect coming, from a coach when they sort of stepped over that level and maybe said something that demeans you or diminished you and you felt that's not just criticizing my wearing technique, that's making me feel less work as a human being, then that is hugely damaging and it's not okay. But actually in that environment there isn't always somebody to actually stop that and so that's not okay anymore and as an athlete, you can feel very vulnerable because that person is going to select who's an Olympic crew, so how can I speak out?

Cath:

And so what I think is now healthy is that we're finding ways to enable athletes to speak out, to say it's not okay to listen to their stories in the case of gymnasts around the world, for the Jenny Homozo kiss to be seen publicly and therefore you can't deny it happened or say she made it up, and so we're seeing more of these examples.

Cath:

That it does highlight how, when we have that power imbalance and when there's no check and balance on someone in authority and a coach has immense power beyond any workplace that a boss would have really, then we're in a really dangerous place where, quickly, we can get into a situation of abusive behaviour. And the whole sports world is now thinking about what can they do to put in place some more checks and balances, the opportunity for everyone's voice to be heard when they're not okay and to be training and supporting coaches so that actually they can navigate this much more skillfully and intentionally and actually see this as the competitive performance advantage that it is as well, because any of these scandals detract from getting on with the job you're there to do, which is to get better and to win races or deliver as a team. So I think it's in an area we see we've perhaps not been very skillful at and people in positions with a power have ended up really not understanding the responsibility. They have to be role models and not to make up the own rules for themselves.

Colin:

Yeah, and I think it's a fabulous point, and I think what we've seen in the sports world is often coaches in the past have hid behind this kind of odds. What you need to do to generate high performance, you know, kind of the verbal abuse, almost the physical abuse as well is this would be somehow excused in order to get the best out of people, and that was never the case. Never the case. There was a great paper in a turn at the center, two thousand to like a million years ago now, where, by the no rally, who talk about behaviors, and they talk about the fact of behavioral theories traditionally Really concentrated on what a leader does rather than who a person is. I think what we've seen over the last two to three years is this real shift now into refocused on well, who is this individual, what are the values, how aware of the words that they say, in the behaviors that they, they project. And this is why I feel that the you know, in this particular case, with ruby allies, with, with, with over mars as well and you just made this point, captain's absolutely spot on what we're seeing now is sporting organizations holding these people to a higher standard.

Colin:

You know, what we saw was the Spanish government in ruby allies case actually take action. They actually introduce legislation based on what happened. The women's world call actually introduce legislation to make an unwarranted kiss, you know, illegal, which haven't been before. So we're actually seeing Sporting organizations now be having to have to take a stance because socially none of these things are acceptable. And and what an organization. So this is fever. This will be the ioc, but other associations really need to educate the people. I think you mentioned this as well is we need to get to the point now were coaches, support staff, everybody really Understands well what are the requirements of building a safe culture where people understand how to behave, what, the same time, understand how to get the best out of each other to generate a level of performance that can see organization succeed and team succeed, because I still that the still the sense that people think that high performance is bullying and harassment and is really really not. You can achieve all of those things in a safe environment where people know how to behave right.

Cath:

We have got to get that message through, haven't we? And I find myself again constantly butting up against that that somehow is there's a fear that I'm not going to train hard enough unless we bully them, when in fact by doing that you are diminishing performance, you're flooding them with Stress hormones, you are making feel unsafe, which is very draining, stops and being able to think, make good decisions under pressure. So Still a lot there to change in. It is. Sometimes it's learn behavior, social behavior. It's what people in previous generations experienced, the coaches that current coaches followed and who they looked up to.

Cath:

So there's a lot to do but as the yeah the fact that this can end up being legislated For shows that culture is now seen right so much higher level, and so there's a lot more we can do to continue to educate ourselves about our responsibility to set a culture, shape a culture, contribute to a culture and think about Relationships first and foremost. And you talking earlier before we, before we started recording about Classy lense, only work in this area and how important his model is, which is when we definitely recommend. It's well known, isn't it, in the organization world. I'm not that many people have really gone sort of ready, but can you give us a dip into how you use it or all the the key features of it?

Colin:

Yes, I'm patrick lense, only for those of you unfamiliar book called the five dysfunctions of the team at. Dysfunction number four Was the needs to avoid personal discomfort prevents team members from holding each other accountable for behaviors and performance. I'm the point that he was making here is the. Actually what we need to do from a team perspective is get to the point where we made an agreement of how we're gonna actually work together and then have the courage to be able to call out where we don't see people behaving in a manner that's required in order to get the performance from team, or else people are doing their job, and I think you know we I certainly the work that I do I see a lot of that dysfunction. There is this real failure to hold each other to account Because they they haven't made those agreements, exactly as cats that they haven't made those agreements about.

Colin:

Okay, well, what's the right way to treat each other? What's the, what's the level of performance that we expect from each other? And then how do we, you know, kind of do that on a day to day basis to get the best out of each other? What's made sure in that our mental and physical health is compromised, and so I think this is a really useful tool, that those dysfunctions, really useful tool to kind of look at and say which of these do we demonstrate, you know, which of these are we saying on a day to day basis?

Cath:

yeah, thanks, I think we definitely recommend add it in the next year. I think if you're interested in trust and we see that trust is one of those issues that's so powerful to organizational performance and there's a lot of studies that a gentleman, uh kind of annual survey, that that sort of shows how important trust is and yet how absent, how increasingly absent, it is, both in business life as well as, of course, in political and public life, and then maybe we'll dip a bit more into that. But let's see, only offers real advice and research around how you build up, literally has that pyramid model, to create an environment where there is safety, where there is trust and and everyone has clarity on that and I think sometimes people just afraid of having these conversations, but actually we need to equally understand if we don't have them, there are some real risks there and it's okay to start to start exploring this area. In fact, it's essential to start exploring this area. So every time we have an episode, we come to the end and we want to give some practical thoughts.

Cath:

During the episode there are some, some references, some readings, some more stories to go and look up, but in each episode we want to have some advice on something you can go away and do. Take action on something you can get curious about and something that you can uncover. So what's the thing we're going to? What's the action? What are we going to suggest that?

Colin:

people do. Well, I think, uh, you know and it's an exercise that I run with teams as well, Cath is is to be deliberate about agreeing behaviors when, when you're actually building a team, when you bring people together, have the conversation, what behaviors do we want to see? What do we not want to see? What's appropriate, uh, and what's not? I think, I think that's for me, that's a that's a crucial one. What do we want people to be curious about, Cath?

Cath:

so I think let's get curious about understanding the impact that our behaviors have on others. So I think that's something to mark over mass that you know he admitted he was unaware of how this was playing out on others and we can get so caught up in our own worldview of what we're seeing and it's really crucial, particularly leadership positions, to be thinking about what's the impact that your behaviors today have had on others.

Colin:

And the last one is to think about?

Cath:

what should we be uncovering?

Colin:

yeah, what's what's underlying those behaviors, what's what's driving them? You know, certainly what we've discussed today is is, if you don't actually take the time to address these, you know, go back to lenseon's dysfunction. Number four is you know, if you don't challenge them, nothing, nothing ever changes. Um, and you know, we, you know kind of, we recognize there's a, there's a level of ego competition, there may be some incentives behind the way that people's behaving, but that it still needs to be understood, because it's only when we really understand what's driving that behavior that we can actually put steps in place to change that brilliant.

Cath:

So be deliberate about the behaviors of developing. Get curious about the impact your behaviors are having on others and start to uncover what's undriving some of these behaviors that aren't very helpful, and we hope that will really help you take a closer, deeper look into the culture in your workplace. Great conversation, thanks.

Cath:

Cath thanks, colin. Thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture podcast.

Colin:

Please remember to like, subscribe and, of course, share with others who you think may be interested.

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Cath Bishop

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Colin D Ellis

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