Keith Antoine is a rarity in the coaching world. As he prepares his athletes for the World Para Athletics Championships, he’ll be coaching business clients too. He explains to Liz Hall how having a foot in both camps benefits each discipline
This month (14-23 July) sees 1,300 athletes from 90 countries compete in the World Para Athletics Championships in London, with the support and challenge of top sports coaches. These include veteran sports coach Keith Antoine.
But what distinguishes Antoine is that he’s also a coach and management trainer in business. “People tend to be either a coach in sport or in business; I do both. I love that the discipline from one helps with the other,” he says.
Antoine has been coaching three athletes for the Championships. Richard Whitehead MBE, who he’s coached since 2011, is a British athlete who runs with prosthetic legs, after having a double through-knee congenital amputation. Whitehead holds the world record for athletes with a double amputation, in both the full and half marathon. Marlou van Rhijn is a Dutch sprint runner who was born without lower legs and runs with the aid of carbon fibre transtibial artificial limbs. She’s the world record holder for T43 in the 100m and 200m events.
US athlete Richard Browne, who Antoine started coaching recently, is a sprint runner who in 2007 had an accident which resulted in his right leg being permanently damaged.
Antoine is feeling confident about the Championships: “If they all do what they should do, they should be walking around with a reasonable amount of ‘hardware’ [medals].”
Antoine’s also coached Stef Reid, a track and field Paralympian who competes for Great Britain, mainly in category T44 long jump and sprint events, and the men’s amputee 4x100m relay team. His athletes won one gold and two silver medals in the London Olympics in 2012. He’s held many national coaching positions, working with juniors, seniors, men and women 100m, 200m and 400m runners.
Among those he’s trained are Denise Lewis, Iwan Thomas and Jamie Baulch. And he’s acted as personal coach to Katharine Merry, Allison Curbishley and Darren Campbell prior to the 2012 Olympics.
In the 1990s, he was appointed (aged 27) as the youngest Team GB national coach for sprints and relays, Paralympic team coach, Senior sprints/hurdles coach for the Midlands, as well as personally coaching athletes to medals in the European and World Junior Championships and on to teams for the Commonwealth, European, World and Olympic Games.
From 2000 until 2006 he was GB Paralympic sprints coach through the Sydney and Athens Games and was brought back on to the team to assist with preparations for London 2012.
However, while highly sought after as a sports coach, Antoine is a rarity in that he also has his other foot firmly placed in the camp of business. He works as an executive coach and management/coach trainer supporting organisations, including IT multinationals, to improve performance.
Challenge
One element that crosses over from sports coaching is that of challenge being important for improving performance.
“If I’m working with someone [in sports] and they have a session to do and I’m expecting a certain speed and they’re not performing, it doesn’t work if I say, how do I feel? The bottom line is, if it’s not fast enough, they have to do it again.”
Although in organisations the approach is different, challenge is still key to boosting workplace performance. Antoine shares how he helped design a project for a large telecoms business, working with a huge cadre of coaches. Part of the programme involved them assisting managers to be better able to assess conversations with others.
“And what you’d have to do is say, ‘Well we can talk about how you did that, but there is a gap between the conversation and what you actually achieved. Let’s see if we can work out why you didn’t get what you wanted.’ One coach was saying, ‘That means having to put a judgement on it.’ Well yeah, it does. There’s a performance level they want to achieve. Lots of coaches had a hard time with that. And this set my brain to thinking, maybe there is a difference between sports and business coaching.”
‘Going soft’ can be unfair to the client, he says. “And this can be lacking in business…When someone sits in an appraisal, it’s a performance to a degree. It’s about this level of robustness, and about people having a clearer idea of what they had to do.”
Much of the work he’s done recently in the business arena has been around what he terms ‘performance conversations’. He’s deliberately chosen to move away from using the label, coaching, although obviously there’s plenty of coaching underpinning how he supports people to have quality dialogue around performance.
He has identified a lack of quality conversations in organisations. “Every organisation has appraisals and a plethora of things that are good and useful. However it doesn’t matter how good the process is, at some point two people have to have a conversation, and they have to understand what they need to develop. And I’ve found their ability to do that isn’t exactly brilliant – it’s not an area that seems to get a lot of focus.
“Only around three to five of every ten leaders have the ability to really generate thought in the other person. These sorts of skills are really lacking. Lots of people understand them so it’s not really down to that, we find – it’s a relatively simple concept.”
But they still struggle. So how does he enable them to have high-quality performance conversations?
“By bringing together, almost merging, business coaching with sports coaching, and looking at three things: The ability to pay attention to whoever you’re talking to, the ability to generate input in the other person – asking questions, for example – and the ability to adapt.
“Lots of people get on the train tracks and if you ask them to get off, they struggle.
“Someone can be sitting there and really understand coaching, why it works and all the stuff around it. However, when they sit and have conversations, they’re borderline useless. Or they don’t understand the essence of coaching, but they’re really effective.”
When he looked closely at what he was doing, he thought “there was too much about the format, the theory, the models”.
“People in business would say, we don’t need that, stop there and tell me to how get on with it.”
His interventions often involve people having real or simulated conversations until they get better at doing so, whatever the context. “When people leave, they have to be in a better position to have quality conversations. If that’s not the case, we need to focus on skills development and whatever we need to do until they improve.”
The development involves briefing actors and the participants just being themselves. “We don’t tell them what we’re looking for. We tend to work in small groups and there’s no feedback. Then we ask, was that what you intended, was it a true reflection? Then, making sure we’re not offering a critique of capability at this stage, we share what we were looking for.
“And then at the end of the three-day programme, which includes games, coaching and homework, they have another conversation, after which we critique their capability.
“The programme supports managers to pay more attention, to question in order to generate thought and to be more flexible. Whatever the context – coaching or succession planning, whatever – these core skills are essential.”
Antoine ran a programme for middle to senior managers at a London borough. “They’d had lots of development – they were scared and averse to dealing with stuff for fear of being called racist, sexist, etc. So they didn’t get challenged. They recognised there was an issue and that they had no culture of performance management.”
In one organisation he worked with, one employee was running a taxi business and taking off lots of time yet he wasn’t being challenged about this.
“The organisation was worried he’d say he was stressed. They weren’t doing anyone any favours.”
Taking part in the programme outlined supported a leader to have a tough conversation with this individual and the issue was resolved.
“It’s about causing people to go and do something they need to do even if they can’t write a paper about coaching. I don’t care, though, I just want them to change what they’re doing and move up a level.”
Antoine also does some one-to-one coaching, at organisations including Vodafone and BT.
Coaching
Getting into sports coaching is “down to my brother”, says Antoine.
“He’s three years my junior, but he was the sports captain of everything. I went into athletics to restore the order! He could thrash me, but I could beat him at the 100m,” chuckles Antoine.
“Then he went on to the four hurdles, and somewhere along the way, I started ‘coaching’ him. His best years were 1987-88, when he represented England at the 400m hurdles.
Soon, though, Antoine was no longer able to access what it felt like to perform at that level. “I could no longer rely on telling people what to do, I had to find another way of doing it. I didn’t yet know about coaching.”
By the mid to late 90s, he started hearing more and more about coaching, and thought: “it seems to be a little like what I do”. He started working [and still does] with David Hemery CBE, a founding partner of Performance Consultants, and a British former track and field athlete, winner of the 400m hurdles at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
He’s worked with Hemery to take coaching skills into schools, off the back of the theme of legacy highlighted in the London 2012 Games.
For him, in business “sport is just a metaphor, an easy way in. I can go to my sports metaphors and videos and people don’t find it threatening, they find it engaging. It’s not about the sport.”
Under the spotlight
Even though Antoine is often in the limelight these days – he does a lot of motivational speaking– when he was growing up, he was the “background person”.
“I have no problem with the athletes being out front doing what they do. I grew up being shy – in a way, I still am.”
But he’s got used to walking out on a platform, and values how challenging it is. “I’ve learnt how to deal with it. I like that it means I have to work contrary to my nature, it means I don’t settle, I remain in that place of challenge. And it’s what I do with my athletes: I put them in a challenging space and it’s no bad thing to know what that feels like.
“It means I have empathy with some people at work, who, when you say, ‘it’s your turn’, just fold under the spotlight. It’s that feeling of being judged, of their performance being scrutinised. If it comes up, my response is, how big a challenge on a scale of 1-10 is it for you to attend to this, learn something, take it on board, adjust your style to display it back at work, and along the way not miss a beat in terms of performance? And how can we support you if only to get it to a five out of 10, for example?
“In business, it’s that ability to stand back and think, what are we actually trying to achieve here? Here it was to race 200m as fast as possible. If I refuse to change the strategy, then we’re stuck. It’s that flexibility – listen and watch and see if something comes up.
“What a lot of organisations do to get effective is put in place systems and processes equivalent to race strategies and if people deviate, they get penalised because they need conformity. But if you can upskill people to hear more from the coalface, you get more feedback, you link to the short circuit. In business, you’re trying to get their awareness really high because they’re really busy either following the process or their agenda.”
What about when Antoine himself faces a challenge? He sets himself a polarising question to get clarity around intent. One example he gives is around how he relates to his 10-year-old son. “I asked myself, when he’s older and about to fly the nest, which do I prefer? Option 1) he loves me dearly and thinks I’m the best dad in the world, but can’t make a decision to save his life, or option 2) he can’t stand the sight of me and can’t wait to get away, but has a brain and can use it. Clearly I’d feel crushed if it was option 1, but it helps me not to go for the easy appease. It’s not mutually exclusive when you get a challenge.
“The best way I can do things is to help him make choices. So I say, ‘Son, I know what you’d like and I can tell you’re not very happy. So we need to fix it. But answer me, how would you like to fix it? With the good or with the naughty behaviour?’ He said, ‘the good’.”
Antoine gets lots of time on his own, but as he’s reflective, he enjoys this.
“I value my own head time, time to reflect and think things through.”
He recognises he personally has a try-hard driver and a tendency to “keep tinkering with stuff”.
“Good is never good enough. I can be challenging to be around, and if in a position of leadership, I do have to bear that in mind!”
Keep it simple
He’s a fan of simplicity. “There’s a joy in complexity, but I like simple. One of my gifts is that I see patterns and it helps with athletics as I can see patterns in movement, while in business, I detect patterns in conversation.”
He recalls how he was working on conversations with managers in a multilingual organisation. “One guy was struggling and he kept saying it was because his mother tongue was German. I was saying, ‘No, it’s not, it’s because you like telling people what to do.’ Getting on the stage was one of the exercises, after which they coached each other. And I said, ‘I tell you what, do it in German.’ It was unbelievably easy to hear open questions and pay attention to responses – you could tell when he was leading. The core of what we do is so simple: it transcends language.”
So how does he think his athletes will get on this month? When we spoke before the summer, he felt sure that even if they did nothing different from then on, they would probably still win. “But I want to take their performance to another level.”
Thinking back to London 2012, he says, “What was most pleasing was that they did their personal best on the day. And that’s what I’m about. I make no apologies for challenging them.”
- For more on the World Para Athletics Championships go to: www.paralympic.org/london-2017