Culture Change
The Challenge
The Premier League, the world’s most-watched sports league, launched the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) to strengthen youth development across 92 professional academies. Performance Focus Ltd was tasked with creating and delivering a people and culture strategy to transform leadership, coaching, and professional standards across this system.
Our Work
Over 10 years, we designed and delivered a wide-reaching programme of people development and cultural change, embedding:
Personal and leadership development for staff at all levels.
Mentoring and executive coaching for 400 leaders, creating a lasting coaching culture.
Communities of practice to raise standards and build professional connection.
Input from world-class leaders in sport, business, the arts, and education.
Continuous learning cultures within clubs.
Key initiatives included:
Elite Coach Apprenticeship Scheme – pioneering self-development for coaches and leaders in football.
Elite Heads of Coaching Initiative – revolutionising coach development across academies.
Elite Academy Manager Programme – building inspiring leadership for directors.
Coach Diversity Programme – advancing diversity and inclusion in football coaching.
Leadership programmes for first-team managers (in partnership with the League Managers Association).
The Outcome
Hundreds of graduates, along with wider academy staff and players, benefitted directly from these interventions. The work established a stronger, more inclusive culture, transformed coach development, and raised professional standards across the 92 academies.
Global Executive Leadership Team
The Challenge
Following rapid global expansion and restructuring, this organisation needed to align its new executive and senior leadership teams, ensuring stronger collaboration, clarity, and effective leadership.
Our Work
We designed a bespoke leadership development programme, including:
Team and individual needs analysis.
Team coaching and development sessions.
Executive coaching and mentoring for C-Suite and senior leaders.
The Purposeful Leaders Programme, focused on self, team, and technical leadership.
Wellbeing and culture coaching interventions.
The Outcome
The programme created a more aligned leadership team with a clear shared vision and stronger strategic execution. Key improvements included:
Greater trust, psychological safety, and collaboration.
Improved decision-making and role clarity.
Healthy conflict and stronger board engagement.
Increased accountability across the team.
Impact was evidenced through 360 feedback, interviews, observation, and performance metrics.
Leadership Development across 92 professional football clubs
The Challenge
Senior leaders and directors in professional football clubs faced increasingly complex leadership demands. While highly skilled in sport, many lacked formal executive leadership training. The Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) set out to strengthen leadership capability across all 92 academies.
Our Work
We designed and delivered a bespoke two-year leadership programme for hundreds of senior leaders, now in its 13th cohort. Key elements included:
Selection, needs analysis, and personalised coaching/mentoring.
Workshops, masterclasses, conferences, and experiential learning.
Peer learning and placements across clubs.
Input from global experts in sport, business, military, education, and the arts.
Postgraduate accreditation to reinforce professional standards.
The programme focused on three key areas:
Self – resilience, emotional intelligence, and wellbeing.
Management – finance, performance management, influence, and coaching skills.
Leadership – vision, strategy, culture, and leading change.
The Outcome
Leaders enhanced their strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, communication, and inclusive leadership skills. They became more effective at driving change, developing talent, and leading with resilience.
The programme also created:
A strong community of practice, fostering lifelong learning and peer support.
System-wide cultural and performance improvements across professional football.
FIFA – Global Leaders
The Challenge
FIFA, the world’s governing body for football with 211 member nations, recognised that limited leadership capability and dysfunctional cultures were holding back football development in many national associations. They asked us to create a solution that would build stronger, future-ready leaders.
Our Work
We co-designed the Global Diploma for Technical Directors (Level 6 accredited), tailored to the needs of leaders across diverse football nations.
The programme included:
Training mentors and executive coaches to support technical leaders.
A curriculum built around five domains: Leadership, High Performance, Coach Education, Amateur Football, and Management.
Strong emphasis on cultural understanding, strategic vision, and organisational capability.
The Outcome
The programme launched globally in 2023 and is now in its 4th cohort, receiving outstanding feedback. It is elevating governance standards, inspiring innovation, and creating sustainable growth across football worldwide. Most importantly, it is shaping the next generation of global leaders who will drive the sport forward.
Leadership and Wholeself-Development - The Powerhouse Project
The Context
In an era marked by huge strides in women’s sport, glaring disparities and barriers persist for women both on and off the pitch. The Powerhouse Project is driving the force for change, by inspiring, educating, enabling and elevating their communities to become the sporting leaders of the future. We were approached to inspire, support and challenge the coaches and leaders.
Our Work
A bespoke solution included workshops and group executive coaching, to provide leadership and wholeself development to female leaders and coaches with high potential. The FA and Nike part-funded this project, which was part of a wider programme offered by the client. Education and change work was delivered on values, purpose, self-confidence, peer support, reflection, feedback and development planning. The programme was delivered by interactive workshops, group coaching, face to face on on-line over a 4-month period.
The Outcome
‘Working with Simone has been such a powerful experience for us at The Powerhouse Project. She came in to run workshops on leadership and what it really means to step into that role, and the impact on our coaches was instant. Simone created a space where everyone felt comfortable, supported, and challenged in all the right ways. She gave our coaches practical tools they could actually use but also inspired them to think bigger about who they are as leaders.
The feedback from the team was amazing, they left the sessions feeling motivated, energised and ready to give their absolute best to the programme and the young people they work with. What’s been even better is that Simone’s influence hasn’t just been a one-off. The workshops and lessons learned continue to shine through in the way our coaches show up every single day.
Simone has made a real, lasting difference to our team, and we couldn’t be more grateful for her time, passion, and expertise’
Rosie and Mollie Kmita Founders, The Powerhouse Project
Culture and Leadership, Manchester City Football Club
The Context
Manchester City F.C. is a top-tier English football club competing in the Premier League. The club is owned by City Football Group (CFG) and won numerous trophies and accolades in recent years. The post-covid culture across the Manchester Club (Men’s, Women’s and Academy) was somewhat siloed and traditional interventions via the internal people team were not impacting. We were asked to undertake both culture and leader development analyses.
Our Work
A detailed needs analysis was conducted via interviews with staff and senior leaders to uncover club culture, preferred ways for leaders to experience development, and leaders’ development needs.
This data drove the design of a 12-month leadership development programme that was individualised in both content and design to match what the club and group needed.
The Outcome
The needs analysis revealed several cultural themes that could be addressed. The leadership development intervention design addressed these themes by recommending specific strategies. Subsequent club briefings addressed these themes in detail to enable changes to be implemented.
Executive Coaching – Senior Leader in Healthcare
The Challenge
A senior leader from the NHS was seeking leadership support through executive coaching. Having never previously used a coach, she was searching for support in leadership skill development, career progression and work-life balance. She felt ‘out of balance’, was struggling with some of her professional relationships, and the risk was that if she didn’t address it, it would impact on her health and confidence.
Our Work
Following chemistry sessions and initial contracting agreements on our approach, we explored coaching programme goals and agreed a mixture of face-to-face and on-line coaching would work best. During each coaching session over a 6-month period, we collaboratively revised the key goals and addressed additional goals that had arisen. Several themes emerged such as well-being and confidence, and the client’s self-awareness, choices and responsibility for action grew stronger over time as she responded well to further discovery work between sessions and in-session thinking space that the coach created.
The Outcome
The client found new confidence, self-belief and self-esteem in work through her own insights – aided by the coach. She quotes, “When previously met with a ‘challenge’ I would invariably step away or feel ‘not capable’ – I now think ‘why not consider it/why not give it a go? ‘. Her new habits around exercise and nutrition added energy to the new skills and tools she developed in her relationships with colleagues, emotional intelligence and listening, notably developing strategies to manage previously stressful situations and confrontation. She also found clarity in her future career aspirations via the trustful and open conversations in our coaching sessions and started playing to her strengths. From her skeptical start, she found great value in executive coaching.
“I would most definitely recommend coaching to anyone, and would especially recommend Simone”
Executive Coaching - CEO in Financial Services
The Challenge
The company is a specialist in the finance packaging process. They sell various products from first charge mortgages, second charge mortgages, bridging loans, buy to let mortgages, commercial mortgages, and equity release mortgages.
The challenge – to deliver coaching to the CEO and senior leaders within the company with a goal of increasing efficiency.
Our Work
A short initial session with the CEO and Executive Team to explain the benefits and process of coaching, after which five executives opted for fortnightly ‘in-person’ executive coaching sessions.
The CEO used coaching to support his focus on strategic priorities, to reduce stress and increase his accountability for actions. The Executive Leaders elicited a range of themes and outputs, namely improved confidence, reduction of stress, better work-life balance, finding time to think , help to find solutions to problems, to talk to independent person, improved productivity.
Our Impact
The CEO’s feedback showed he was better able to organise his thoughts, identify clearer goals, and put better structure in place which significantly increased his efficiency. A range of successful outcomes from the leaders are captured below;
‘The coach asked great questions to make me realise the priorities of the business’, ‘enhanced reflection and insight’, ‘less procrastination in work’, ‘more productive’, ‘less stressed’, ‘time to think’
Executive Coaching – Performance Director, Elite Sport
The Challenge
This performance director was employed in one of the top global organisations in world sport. As is typical in many professions, he had been promoted to an executive leadership role quickly, from a career based on technical expertise, and was seeking support in relationship and stakeholder management, balancing work and life as a parent, and confidence in the new world of the boardroom.
Our Work
Three-way coaching goals were established with the organisation sponsor/line-manager and helped frame our coaching but didn’t limit it.
The client reported increases in confidence via strengths-based coaching and encouraging honest reflection.
We created a safe-space to reflect about sensitive work and personal topics which led to some additional tools and coping strategies to help him improve stakeholder management and manage his own perfectionism in a tough work-life period.
Our Impact
“Improved confidence, additional tools and coping strategies, plus it has helped me understand potential future career options (what I am and what I am not)”