ASCA Podcast #60 - Daniel Cooper

Daniel is an 18yr veteran of Australian Special Operations with extensive experience on combat operations throughout his career. He has also pursued a parallel passion for human performance with academic knowledge and developed human-performance programs for Special operations and worked within elite sport. He is now focused on researching evidence-based practice for developing optimal behaviours to maximise accurate information processing, response selection and stress resilience in high consequence, complex and adaptive environments. He is also an avid practitioner in testing physical and mental limits though varied competitions and several of the world’s toughest adventure races and extreme endurance events. QUOTES “There are very few things that come up that are replicated from one great leader to another and there are not a lot of leaders out there that are successful across a number of different domains” “Where leadership falls down is where the leader makes themselves crucial to the team so the team cannot function without them” “You don’t want people to become guarded in any type of performance review and if you highlight a problem, you want to use questioning to help them solve that problem” “Mentally if we have the same stimulus all the time, you kind of switch off to it so we need that novelty of stimulus” SHOWNOTES 1) Daniel’s experience in the military and rugby union 2) Recruitment strategies, identifying bias and the military approach to assembling high performing teams 3) Traits of leaders and why these are specific to the situation leaders are in and not normally transferable 4) Self-organizing behaviors versus compliant behaviors and being adaptive in when these should be applied 5) Creating both a sense of belonging and transparency in a team and why the sequence you apply these may be important 6) Some of the myths of leadership including it being very dependent on the situation and the quality of the team underneath the leader and why more or less authoritative behaviors might be needed 7) Feedback both up and down a chain and ways and methods of delivering feedback 8) How to integrate and combine informal and formal reviews into high performing teams 9) Working memory and cognitive fatigue effects along with perceptions of stress and anxiety on physical performance 10) Why some people get selected in the special forces and some people do not PEOPLE MENTIONED Graham Henry Bill Belichek Nick Saban