Integrity has a direct impact on the success, brand and reputation of every sporting person and organisation – especially in today’s environment. Sport in Australia has the immense potential and ability to profoundly influence our community and all generations.  So, people, integrity and culture are simply critical.  Sport and its people need to role model best practice – on and off the field. 

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Integrity is broader than just “doing the right thing” as a tick-box exercise and having the policies, processes and frameworks in place.  It stretches to:

• identifying and understanding a shared purpose, vision, strategy, values and behaviours – the foundation of any positive organisational culture;

• ongoing professional development of employees and contracted athletes; and,

• welfare fundamentals such as encouraging and providing opportunities for athletes to have interests and experience outside of sport to make them better people in life.

 

You can have the most robust governance and integrity frameworks and guidelines in place.  Yet they will fail unless supported by leadership, culture, values and behaviours. Why?  Because sport doesn’t rely on machinery or digitisation to achieve its goals.  It relies on people.

 

So, for sport and sporting organisations to adopt best practice governance and truly act with integrity, it must be connected to people. And that’s where I come in...