Culture and data: What sets the Sydney Swans apart on and off the field
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Want to build a culture of elite performance in your business? Sydney Swans COO Drew Arthurson will show you how
About the episode
Game days start hours before the opening siren for Sydney Swans’ COO Drew Arthurson. His game prep usually includes hosting corporate events. And sometimes making coffee for the players.
Everyone in the organisation has their own game-day rituals, but when you break it down, it’s the art and science of how individuals do their best work.
Elite performance is what everyone at the Sydney Swans strives for, regardless of their role. Drew explains the key leadership principles underpinning that shared goal.
This episode is hosted by Dr Juliet Bourke.
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Transcript
Drew Arthurson: We're creatures of habit as a footy club, so my specific role just before the players leave is to make their coffee. So we're all together, little campfire experience that we have, and then everyone goes up to the game, and you ride the wave.
Dr Juliet Bourke: That's Drew Arthurson, the chief operating officer of the Sydney Swans AFL club. As COO, Drew's in charge of the day-to-day operations of the whole organisation. So why is he making coffee for footballers? For Drew, it's the simple tasks that underpin a culture of high performance.
Drew Arthurson: Everyone sweeps the floor. We're indifferent about your role or your tenure, but if there's a job to do you do that job.
Dr Juliet Bourke: That mindset, along with some key leadership strategies, saw the Swans through to the Grand Final in 2024 with a whopping 2 million Australian fans supporting them. And it's not just the players pushing for elite performance. Everyone in the Swans organisation expects the best from themselves and their colleagues.
Drew Arthurson: For the Sydney Swans, we believe a culture is organic. It requires sunlight and water, and people from the chair to the intern can strengthen that, or dilute that every single day.
Dr Juliet Bourke: This is The Business Of, a podcast from the UNSW Business School. I'm Dr Juliet Bourke, a professor of practice in the School of Management and Governance. When Drew Arthurson came to the Sydney Swans in 2020 it was his first time working in elite sport, but he quickly learned that the key principles for high performance are universal, whether that's with a ball or in the boardroom. But let's start with the ball... Drew, tell us what game day looks like for the swans.
Drew Arthurson: So for our male and female athletes, they'll either play 23 games for the men, or this year 11 for the women. Let's take a home game: the lead into the game will be a mix of training, opposition research, game plan. On the match day itself, as a staff we'll arrive about five to six hours before the game. We'll set up everything from the stadium to the street to our headquarters. The coaches will arrive, they'll be there really early, reviewing what they can – what they can control, what they can't. And then the athletes will arrive, very idiosyncratic here, two to three hours before bounce. Everyone has their rituals, what's to get them in their best flow state. That will range from ice baths to a light warm up in the gym, to music to coffee, you name it. Then two hours before the game the male athletes will do a version of either an official March, where they'll march down the street to the stadium, or they'll walk up in small groups. From that point, you'll then do a mix of team-based activities and individual prep. And the art and science of that is knowing what athletes need to do, in our case to prepare themselves for two hours of game time,
Dr Juliet Bourke: And what about for you and your support staff?
Drew Arthurson: So folks often think we just arrive a couple hours before, we turn the lights on and we play football. If only it was that easy. So for many of us, it is setting up the signage inside the stadium, creating great activations on the street for our members and fans. Back at HQ, we host members and companies through on a game day. So, say on a Friday night game, I'll be there at 8, 7 or 8 in the morning. The game's at 7:40 at night, for example. And you'd be preparing for that day, and so that's a mix of stadium, street and HQ set up. A few hours before the bounce, my role changes. So I either host, might be private bookings, I might do an interview or two. But we're creatures of habit as a footy club, so my specific role just before the players leave is to make their coffee. So we're all together little campfire experience that we have, and then everyone goes up to the game and you ride the wave. And a lot of us are working, so you're on the headphones, you're moving around the stadium to make sure everyone's experience is right, you're solving problems – you've got 40,000 plus people in a small space, so you have to make decisions and solve problems. And then post-game everyone comes back to HQ and you review, you put on a light snack and beverage for people, and you go home. So game days are massive undertakings. So all told, the day itself is probably a 12 to 15 hour day by the time you arrive to the time you exit, for staff and coaches. For the athletes, they'll be there two to three hours before and then couple of hours post. So it is a really amazing day, it's an electric atmosphere. But if you come back to it, it is the art and science of how individuals do their best work. How do we prepare as a group, and then how do you afford each team member player to get in their own space and to get in a flow state that they know works for them.
Dr Juliet Bourke: Sport is known for this sort of high-performance culture. What does that look like for the members supporting them, not the players but the members of your organisation?
Drew Arthurson: I'd never worked in professional sport before joining the Sydney Swans nearly five years ago. So I've had the good fortune of 25 years in lots of different industries, not elite sport. One of the things that struck me, and remains true today, are the parallels that you can make and the insights you can draw from elite on field performance from off field. A couple of examples – one is being really clear and at ease about the things you can control and the things you can't control in business. Secondly, it is embracing feedback loops. It's something we're working on a lot as a business. One of the benefits of being an elite athlete is you will never die wondering. You'll always get plenty of feedback, and that feedback will obviously be mixed in terms of things you can do more of and things to work on. And so we're obsessed with having really effective feedback loops for our teams off the field. Another one is to... and it sounds really simple to say, but I think it's often lacking in business, is having absolute mission clarity. What's my role as an individual? Be that CEO of the Sydney Swans, might be a marketing manager, might be someone who's leading our sponsorships team. What's my role? So as a business, I think we absolutely need to give people mission clarity, and that then informs a bigger game plan. There are so many things that you can take from on field, practice to off field. A number of areas won't translate. Obviously it's a physical execution is the game, but so many things you can.
Dr Juliet Bourke: Yeah, I like that, and I imagine – and tell me if this is true or not – that because it's very much about the team that might infuse you as an organisation, you think of yourself perhaps more as a team. Does it help to break down silos?
Drew Arthurson: Absolutely it does. It's a really good insight. We're all custodians of the Sydney Swans at this time, so we're blessed to be part of an organisation that's rich in history. And you just you want to do two things, I think. We talk about taking the baton, so the baton is something you take and you pass. So hopefully you receive it from someone who's done their best work, and then you have the opportunity to do yours. And no one's bigger than the club. So if we get it right, and we're always going to get it right some days and some days we don't, but hopefully you get it right more often than not, and it is about ensuring that everyone understands the role they play to deliver that team outcome. Because whether it's on field or off, as you'd appreciate, unless you're an absolute sole trader you are working with other humans trying to deliver something collectively.
Dr Juliet Bourke: What are the traits of elite athletes that you're trying to embody across the organisation?
Drew Arthurson: We talk internally about a category 1, 2, 3 model. And category one is, 'What's your absolute core role at the football club?' That's category one. And category two is then discretionary effort you can apply to support others and add value. And category three might be things completely out of the box that we haven't thought of yet. So the first thing we focus on is what everyone's cat one is. So that's your mission. What's your job? Your core job, to do really well firstly. Secondly is then, as I mentioned earlier, we talk about feedback loops. So we want everyone to have a culture of 360 degree feedback. We find that the longer you leave feedback from the moment it should be given, the more political it gets, the more loaded it gets, the hazier people's memory is. So real time feedback as much as possible is fantastic. One of the frustrations I've had in previous lives is the notion of annual performance review. Why wait 12 months to almost tell me the history of my year? Nothing should be a surprise at the end of the year when, Juliet, you're giving me feedback. I would hope that it is something that's a rolling process, but I find that it is really inconsistent. The benefits of working at a football club, with the games we play, you're audited every week. So you have an on field audit, and in turn you have an off field audit. So we feel like we are put through the x-ray machine week in, week out. When you put yourself through the x-ray machine – or your team or it might be a product – all the whole parts show up, and all the cracks show up. But I think that level of accountability, scrutiny, expectation, I hope engenders greater level of performance because the stakes are high. The third area is understanding working everyone's strengths. So we talk internally about giving each other the benefit of the doubt. It's often something that's overlooked. So if the opposition's outside the four walls not in, then let's focus on giving it to the benefit of the doubt. And finally, trying to shift a collective mindset from 'I have to do a, b and c' to 'I get to do a, b and c'. There's an evidence base that says that the mindset shift you can get collectively when people move from have to to get to is pretty significant. So there are many traits and examples, they're a few.
Dr Juliet Bourke: And this formal audit process that you go through, what does that comprise?
Drew Arthurson: For every single week, we will either win or lose. And once every four years we'll draw, on average. What happens pre and post that for our teams, is that you'll go through a really exacting review process. So you obviously prepare and build for a game – and convert the game notion to a major deal you might be trying to close or restructure you're trying to execute, whatever that is for your organisation – you go through that game and then immediately afterwards you recover and you review. We liken it to a 'hot wash', an international term that's akin to reviewing really objectively, going through your feedback process, and then moving on as fast as you can because the next game is coming. So you're going to be audited again in another week's time. So what did you learn? How can we improve? And then that's in your review mirror, let's go again. It's an exciting cycle.
Dr Juliet Bourke: But that's a lot – that's a fast cadence, that's a weekly cadence. And in business, of course you would do review but it would be after a major deal. It could be months after that, after a project's being executed. What does it do to an organisation to have this constant cycle of review?
Drew Arthurson: It definitely requires discipline in the organisation. Discipline and rigor about how you'll prepare, execute and review firstly. But it also requires you, in the best way, to move on. I've learned so much Juliet working at the football club, another thing that I've learned a lot about is how to process information, process a business outcome – in our case, win or lose, and then to move on and prepare to the next one. And it's a version of radical acceptance. You are where you are. We won or we lost. What did we learn? How are we going to get better? And on the getting better part, one of the things that I think is absolutely applicable, and folks in all walks of life can act on, is something we focus on internally called 'incremental improvement'. This is not splitting the atom, but what we're focused on the compounding benefits of small gains each and every day. So how do I, Drew as COO, get a little bit better each day? I'm not looking for breakout growth, I just want to make incremental improvements. Why incremental? Because they are, we believe, sustainable. So a couple of questions that I'm asking myself of late to try and hold myself to that standard of getting a little bit better each day, threefold. One – ‘Did I learn something new?' Question one. Question 2 – ‘Am I healthier in some way?' That might be mentally, physically, spiritually. The third question is, 'Did I help someone without expecting anything in return?' I think the third one's the most powerful. Is that a stranger, a loved one, a colleague, an elderly parent. What I'm striving for, and what we're striving for as a team, is to try and say yes to as many of those questions as many days in the year. And just to round out my thought, there's 230 business days in a standard year for a working Australia – less annual leave, less weekends, less kick offs and planning sessions. So what we're hoping is that for our staff off field, and there's 90 of them, how can as many of those 90 say yes on as many of those days to questions like that or questions of their own, so that we've really got a culture of sustained, incremental improvement.
Dr Juliet Bourke: I mean, in some ways, it's a very difficult business to be in, because your competitors are very similar in a way. I mean, they're all playing the same game and all you're doing, in some ways, is, you know, trading players or, you know, having the best coach or something like that. And I think about your competition being, you know, the Lions and the Demons. Is that right?
Drew Arthurson: Yeah, you're doing really well.
Dr Juliet Bourke: How do you separate yourself from the competition when you're playing the same game and it's just down to players and coaches?
Drew Arthurson: So a couple of parameters, perhaps for the audience. Firstly, the intent of Australian rules football is for it to be as equalised as possible. So our parent body, the Australian Football League, hope and try to enact a system whereby every two to three years every team in the competition, there are 18 teams, has a chance to win the grand final. There are few levers that they apply to try and make that happen. Number one, there are spending caps. So, you don't have like the Premier League where you have an arms race, where Man City can spend 3x what another team can. So there are spending caps that are really strict, firstly, so that levels it a little bit. Secondly, depending on your success the previous year, you'll either play a harder set of games against opponents or a slightly easier set of games. So there are a number of levers that are put in place to try and balance up the competition. So then we'll sit back and say, 'Okay, given these equalising factors, how can we then gain competitive advantage?' So a few things that we can do. Firstly, how do we attract and retain the best people? And we back our system and our culture, we hope, so that we say 'We'll get person x in and we'll unlock 1.5 of an outcome or a dividend, whereas another team might only unlock one'. So can we get a competitive advantage through our culture and ways of working with the people we can attract and retain? Number one. Number two, it's absolutely about data informed decision making. So in an equalised competition, how can we extract value and insights from the data that we collect and then put into practice on and off the field? Our benchmark week in week out, year in year out, is to make finals. So that is a never ending KPI for a football club. We want to be competitive year in year out, and hold ourselves to that standard.
Dr Juliet Bourke: I love that. Everything else being equal your competitive advantage is driven by culture and data.
Drew Arthurson: The culture is the gold standard for how an organisation will thrive or not. That's stating the obvious. For the Sydney Swans, we believe the culture is organic – it requires sunlight and water and people from the chair to the intern can strengthen that or dilute that every single day. But fundamentally, it is about the way things are done around our organisation. And a couple of simple rules that we try to illustrate and to have everyone embody and embrace – one is really simple, everyone sweeps the floor. I think that's... I hope is common in many organisations. We're indifferent about your role or your tenure, but if there's a job to do you do that job. Second is your level of curiosity. I think it's such a tell around high performing organisations and robust culture is people's level of curiosity. I'm always fascinated by the questions that people ask or don't ask. I think that's a significant one. And third is your capacity to deal with ambiguity. So much of our business, but most businesses I've been part of or observed, you have so many things that aren't black and white, that require judgment calls. You're drawing on your own evidence based decision making processes. So how you can deal with ambiguity is a significant one. And fourth, I touched on it earlier, but it's something that we really, really obsess over, high trust levels and giving each other benefit the doubt. It's a notion of generous assumptions. If you can get these elements in place, you can absolutely help build a robust culture, and it's got to be underpinned by effective communication. I'm always frustrated or at a loss when I hear about people that leave a meeting conversation more confused than when they went in. Who's got time for that? So let's honor the time we have, the dialog we're trying to have, and just focus on being really candid, respectful and candid, in the conversations we have.
Dr Juliet Bourke: When you're recruiting someone to work in your 90 person organisation, what are you looking for in that person? How do you know they're going to be the right fit?
Drew Arthurson: I'll make a public service announcement – we will never get this right every time, obviously. So we'll, you know, we'll make great hiring decisions, we'll make hiring decisions that don't work out. There's some rules that we apply to try and to bring great people into our organisation. Firstly, we want to socialise that candidate with as many people inside the business as possible. So what do we mean by socialise? So once you get through a formal interview process, perhaps if we're trying to recruit you in. You might go through the relevant interviews, two or three, and we can confirm your capabilities, your skills, your experience set. But after that it's how do you how do we socialise you with... let's say, really good individual contributors or peer leaders across the business, so that you get a better sense of us and we get a better sense of you, especially beyond the formal interview. I don't know about yourself, but I've certainly had experiences in the past where you do an interview and you think 'I aced that interview. They saw the best version of me.' Okay, that's fine. But how do we really understand the candidate better? So that socialisation process is really important, very informal, so we get understanding of each other, culture, values, vision, etc. That's number one. So hopefully that's a gating process to try and bring the right people in the organisation. Then it is those things I mentioned earlier, which I'll come back to, which is, I think, for a candidate, a new starter, to be successful at a football club, what's their level of authenticity and curiosity? Firstly, that's a massive tell, I think, in an organisation. Are they willing to sweep the floor? Is something you can tell really quickly as people try and embed themselves an organisation, and they'll watch and see what others are doing. And then three is their capacity to engage cross functionally. So much of our work inside of our business – we're a small to medium business – so much of it requires working cross functionally. So how well do you work in an environment where there's a sense of accountability without control? We have high expectations, but we require people to work with other peers and individuals across the business to connect, engage and do their work. So those are some things we look for early on, and we'll just see how people go.
Dr Juliet Bourke: Some people say that football is like a religion. If there's a person who doesn't have that religion, let's say they don't even follow football, would you employ them?
Drew Arthurson: Yeah, I would. People would be making a choice firstly. So we talk about internally quite a lot is that people are making a choice to come to our organisation, and we hope our organisation is a place where people can do their life's best work. But ultimately, they're not a prisoner. They're making a choice. If you lined up... Let's generalise for a second. If you lined up people on a spectrum, they'd be on a spectrum from volunteers-esque (so volunteers in spirit – delighted to come to work, can't wait, doing cartwheels) through to say, prisoners (folks that are stuck, where work's happening to them not for them). So that's your spectrum. Ultimately, unless you are really stuck and you have no options in your career, you're making a choice. So the question to ask yourself – leaders, individual contributors – is, 'Am I on the right bus? Is life happening to me or for me? And what am I waiting for?' Because fundamentally, and this is deeply philosophical, but I believe the universe is indifferent. So unless you are waiting, unless you believe that someone's going to divine a certain business outcome for you, what are you waiting for? And therefore, if this organisation or this industry is not for you, can you change that? When recruiting people or trying to attract people to join the Sydney Swans, you find out really quickly whether they're a football fan or not. The alarms go off if someone is a mega fan, because you think, 'I'm not sure you'll have the right level of pragmatism about working for this business'. So trying to remind people in an interview process that they're not part of the selection committee, they won't be the head coach, but thank you for your feedback on game strategy and player selection. So the red flags definitely go up if someone is a mega fan, because we do worry about their ability to be objective and pragmatic in business. To join and work for a professional sporting team, you do need a level of fandom. You either need to love the game or at least be passionate enough about the game. I think if you're indifferent about it it'd be hard to do your best work. Because it does require discretionary effort , you're working long hours and weekends, and does require curiosity about the sport and the people who love it. They're our customers. So could someone come from a standing start? If they had the right generalist traits, probably. But we need to understand, are they willing to go that next step to deeply connect with our members and fans, understand what makes them tick to do their best work.
Dr Juliet Bourke: Is there a difference in your organisation between those people who are effectively the 'fee earners' - the players – and those people who are the support? How do you see yourself as really one team, not the on field team and not the off field team?
Drew Arthurson: Yeah, we have a game plan with five parts to it, which I won't describe now, but the five parts are really clear pillars that underpin... it's our business plan. So we call it a game plan, because we're a footy club, okay. All five pillars are elements that a player or a staff member can contribute to in big and small ways, and we always tie everyone's role back to that game plan, so that everyone can see the way in which they can impact our business. So for folks on the field, it might be doing their best work playing football, contributing to our wins and losses. For folks off field, it might be securing a sponsorship, retaining a member, being great at doing their finance – so accounts payable and receivable, managing our books. For marketing and communications, it might be putting the best products out there, our versions of podcasts and videos and the like. So we always try and ensure that everyone understands their role, and then we can tie it back to that game plan so that people can see how they contribute in big and small ways.
Dr Juliet Bourke: I get that. I get that in theory. But I guess my question is going to in every business there seems to be this division between, for example, those people who are in the profit and loss role and those people who are in support role and yours is even more stark. You know, you have these players who... there's so much adulation around them, you know, they're put on front covers, and then you have the back-office team. And even though everyone has their own role and they know it intellectually, isn't there a risk that the players are seen as gods, and the, you know, floor sweeping is actually done by the people behind the scene.
Drew Arthurson: I can see how that would be a risk. And I certainly know that the culture is different, say, in some of the major US sports, where you do have incredible player agency and very, very strong delineation between a playing role and, say, a support role. Here it's a little bit different, because we are a small to medium business, and we're exacting in our standards and the expectations we have, no matter what your role is there are still things you need to do at the Sydney Swans football club. So "we don't care" if you are one of the number one players in the country, or if you are being with the football club in a support role for six months. Irrespective, here are the things that we expect you to do and need you to do when you're working for our organisation. Now you are going to have, I guess, a continuum in terms of personalities and the like, but we've got minimum expectations around what people will do. So is there a risk of that? Yes, but I think it comes back to your culture and your expectations of your people. It's the art and science of trying to balance personalities and roles inside an organisation. We talk a lot about that mix of personal humility and professional will. So take your role seriously, don't take yourself too seriously. Now, some people's roles will be very public and some people's roles will be very private, but being at ease about that and having a set of minimum expectations and ways of working that no matter what that role is, when you come back to the club and the lights are off, the cameras aren't rolling, you're just doing your job at HQ, here are the minimum expectations we have all the humans that come to work at the Sydney Swans.
Dr Juliet Bourke: The big result your players are focused on is about as black and white as it gets. Win that game. But how do game results impact supporting staff members of your organisation?
Drew Arthurson: Yeah, one of the dynamics of our game... and let's talk about the grand final, for example, because it's the best example. So the grand final result obviously did not go our way. We had a very disappointing loss. For so many of our staff at the Sydney Swans, they're not part of the on field delivery – so they're not a player, they're not a coach. So they might be in the marketing and communications team, the IT team, operations, membership. For all of them, the challenge is separating the disappointing result that we all feel, because we're all part of the Sydney Swans journey, but separating that result from the great work that they've done during the year. It's a really interesting... it's a live case study for us at the footy club, and as a leadership team how to navigate that. How to provide enough space for everyone to feel disappointed, because we are, but at the same time for folks that actually weren't contributing to that on field product and result, affording them the time and space to say, 'You know what? That aside – which is something you can't control – you've done an amazing job this year'. And that's a really delicate balance, week in, week out. Because you do ride the wave. You know when our women's or men's team have won a lost you can feel it, especially on the Monday when you played on the weekend. But for so many of our staff it's reinforcing the fact that their job, their category one, each and every day is not to pull on the boots, it's to do the role we need them to do off field. And for a lot of them they've had their best year. So taking the time to celebrate those wins. I think one of the challenges when you're moving at pace in business, whether it's sport or another industry, and this is something I've been guilty of in the past, is not taking the time to celebrate the wins. I was talking to a group recently and I was saying that one of the challenges I have, and I'm really working on this myself, is I'd focus more on the losses, definitely, than the wins. And I wonder how common that is. The wins you almost bank and you expect in business that you will achieve, but then you'll obsess over the losses. And I think for our team, it's making sure you get that balance right.
Dr Juliet Bourke: The Business Of podcast is brought to you by the University of New South Wales Business School, produced with Deadset Studios. If you're interested in hearing more about the business of sport, you'll enjoy our episode with Darren Werner, the Head of Marketing at KO Sports.
Darren Werner: With the emergence of some key sporting properties, whether it be the UFC or F1, that really presents us and streaming services an opportunity to not just appeal to the fans that are watching that specific sport, but look at lookalike audience.
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