At Sport Wales, we’ve invested in leadership programmes for our partners for many years to help people be the best they can be and to bring out the best in others.
But, this year, we have decided to do things differently by offering a brand new programme – Becoming an Inclusive Leader – as part of our commitment to shifting thinking and understanding around equality, diversity and inclusion in Welsh sport.
The eight-month-long programme will be led by AKD Solutions, who will bring in experts for in-depth discussions that will challenge candidates to consider how they view equality, diversity and inclusion, evaluate how they’ve behaved previously to others, and think about whether they’ve made decisions with a conscious or an unconscious bias.
Fifteen candidates are currently being selected for the course, which gets underway soon. The candidates will be drawn from partners such as National Governing Bodies, Local Authorities and wider national partners, as well as some internal Sport Wales colleagues.
Eleanor Ower, our People Development Lead, is co-ordinating the programme.
Eleanor said: “I feel really passionate about the programme because I myself have often wondered whether I could have done more throughout my career to ensure sport was available to everyone.
“I remember my first job out of university as a Community Sports Officer. It was in Maindee, Newport – a deprived area with a high percentage of people from an ethnic minority background. I was from Newbridge – an area that you’d describe as mainly white, with very little diversity in the population. It was very different to where I was working, and yet there I was, making decisions that affected a community that I knew very little about.
“Looking back, I do wonder if I approached it in the right way. Did I ask enough questions and take the time to learn? We use the term “hard to reach” when talking about a range of communities that don’t get involved in our programmes. But is it us, the organisations, that are hard to reach and inaccessible?
“This programme certainly won’t be about having all the answers. But it will encourage leaders within Welsh sport to press pause, stop and think. How do I learn more? Do I need to change the way I am behaving?
“The aim is to start influencing leaders within the sector. In turn, we hope that it will have a knock-on effect in terms of recruitment. Because to make Welsh sport truly great, from grassroots to elite, we need a richness of different cultures, different backgrounds, different perspectives and ideas. And that means we need people to be running sport from all sorts of different viewpoints with different lived experience.
“We also hope that leaders will start to think differently, looking through a diversity lens, to help them make decisions that will encourage more people, whatever their background, to take part in sport.”
The Becoming an Inclusive Leader programme is a prime example of Eleanor’s role which sees her tasked with understanding workforce trends and needs within other walks of life, business and sectors, and identifying how that learning can support the Welsh sporting workforce.
Eleanor added: “In order to deliver our ambitions for Welsh sport we must ensure that the people who are working or volunteering in the sector are fully equipped with everything they need to become the best they can be. It’s really important for the needs of the Welsh sporting workforce to be at the heart of our conversations with partners. Our partners should be constantly thinking about their people development needs and what that means for them.”
Please get in touch with Eleanor if you’d like to chat more about this.