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I've been writing about better ways of leading, coaching, and competing for over three decades. And yet, I find myself returning to the same essential question — the one that I believe sits at the very heart of what ails our sport system: what are we actually building when we build a team?
I used to think this was a question with a simple answer. Experience — and the courageous voices of over a thousand individuals who came forward to the Future of Sport in Canada Commission — has taught me that it is anything but.
The truth, as I have come to understand it, lives not at either end of a spectrum but in the beautifully complex and often messy middle: we are building winning teams and we are building human beings. We are pursuing excellence on the podium and we are pursuing excellence in how we treat one another. These are not competing priorities. They are complementary poles of the same vision — and when we privilege one at the expense of the other, both suffer.
A Podcast That Stopped Me in My Tracks
I recently had the pleasure of listening to Robert Digings speak on the Coaches Rising podcast about what he calls the Highly Relational Team. Robert is an executive coach and team development consultant who has spent over two decades studying what genuinely makes teams exceptional. Not just functional. Not just podium-ready. Genuinely, sustainably exceptional.
His central insight is one that I have been circling in my own work for years, and hearing him articulate it so clearly felt like recognition: the biggest improvements in a team come when people have the courage to do the challenging inner and relational work of developing deep personal connections and a real sense of belonging.
Performance and relationships are not in tension. They are in relationship. You cannot fully have one without the other.
Robert's model builds on two interwoven processes — a personal process and a team process. At the individual level, this means cultivating self-awareness, presence, and mindfulness: the capacity to show up fully and attentively in relationship with others. At the team level, it means developing genuine unity, psychological safety, and the courage for honest, sometimes difficult conversations. He describes the fundamental paradox of team life as the need to "think as many but act as one" — a balance only achieved when personal presence and collective unity are held together, not traded off against each other.
This is where cultural intelligence and relational intelligence meet. In my earlier piece on cultural intelligence, I wrote about the importance of measuring how well values are being lived inside our sport organizations — moving beyond annual surveys toward a genuine, data-informed understanding of our collective way of being. We know that what gets measured, gets managed, and that culture is too important to leave to chance.
Robert Digings is saying something beautifully complementary: the relational quality of a team is equally too important to leave to chance. Cultural intelligence tells us what the culture is. Relational intelligence — the capacity to build, sustain, and repair meaningful human connections — tells us how it is lived, moment by moment, in the space between people. Both are accurate. Neither is complete on its own.
Together, they give us something we have desperately needed in sport: a fuller, more integrated picture of what it means to thrive.
The Cost of Leaving Relationships to Chance
As an Integral Master Coach who has spent years accompanying sport leaders, coaches, and athletes through some of their most vulnerable moments, I can tell you that relational work is not soft. It is the hardest, most courageous work that a team can undertake. And in high-performance sport — where the pressure to perform can quickly crowd out almost everything else — it is also the work most consistently left undone.
I’ve had athletes share that they can’t tell their coach they are struggling because they don’t feel safe enough. I’ve had a staff member who witnessed misconduct and stayed silent because speaking up felt career ending. I’ve worked with teams that looked cohesive on paper but were rife with limiting beliefs, exclusionary practices, and divisive language. These are not inevitable realities. They are the predictable result of leaving relationships to chance — of privileging one pole of the performance-and-people polarity so completely that the other collapses under the weight.
As I wrote in my blogs on polarities, over-focus on one pole doesn't just diminish the neglected pole — it ultimately undermines the very pole being over-focused upon. When we pursue winning at the expense of human well-being, we don't just harm people. We eventually harm the winning too. The scandals, the departures, the broken trust, the depleted athletes — these are the predictable downstream costs of an unintegrated system.
Robert reminds us that small relational moments often carry the greatest impact. A coach who pauses to truly listen. A leader who names the tension in the room rather than managing around it. An athlete who is seen and heard as a whole person. These moments compound. They build cultures of trust and belonging — or, when they are consistently absent, cultures of fear and silence. We have had far too much of the latter, for far too long.
The Triple Bottom Line: Money, Medals, and Morals
In my book Values-in-Action: Igniting Passion and Purpose in Sport Organizations (2012), I wrote about the need to shift from management-by-objective toward management-by-values — a humanistic approach that holds excellence on the field of play alongside excellence in how we treat one another. Both matter. Both are mission critical. We move in the direction that we are being measured, and for nearly fifty years, we have been measuring primarily two things: money and medals.
It is time to add a third. It is time to also measure morals.
I want to be clear about what I mean. This is not an argument for trading performance for people, or medals for meaning. That would simply be collapsing in the other direction. What I am inviting is the expansion of our measurement framework so that it holds all three as equally important, interdependent expressions of organizational health. Money and medals and morals. Winning and wellness. High performance and human dignity. These are the polarities our system must learn to hold together, not resolve in favour of one side.
The Future of Sport in Canada Commission, led by former Chief Justice Lise Maisonneuve and released in March 2026, confirmed what many of us have been saying for years: maltreatment in sport is widespread, systemic, and ongoing. Power imbalances and a culture of silence have allowed harm to persist, because winning, reputation, and funding have too often been privileged over participant well-being. More than a thousand individuals came forward — including 175 survivors of abuse and maltreatment — because they needed their experience to be acknowledged before anything else could heal.
As a grief and loss educator, I know this deeply. We cannot grieve collectively what we have not yet named. And we cannot build something new until we have honestly reckoned with what the old system cost us.
Managing by values means that how we achieve results matters as much as the results themselves. Organizations are accountable not only for outcomes, but for the conditions they create and the culture they permit. And as Robert Digings so powerfully articulates, those conditions are built — or quietly dismantled — through the quality of everyday relational moments. This is not idealism. This is what I have come to call intelligent risk management: the recognition that a sport environment which neglects relational health is not just morally compromised — it is organizationally fragile.
What the Commission Is Asking of Us
The Commission's 98 Calls to Action represent the most comprehensive roadmap for sport reform Canada has ever had. Among the most urgent: a Pan-Canadian Safe Sport Education program, universal background screening policies, the designation of safeguarding officers in every funded organization, and a centralized registry of sanctioned individuals. These structural reforms are essential, and I am grateful for each one.
And — here is the polarity I most want to name — structures without culture are just rules waiting to be broken.
The Commission's calls to action require implementation by human beings working within relationships. Safe sport policy and relational safety. Governance reform and cultural intelligence. Accountability structures and highly relational teams. Neither pole is sufficient on its own. Both are needed, together, in equal measure. This is what wholeness looks like in a holistic sport system.
This is why the highly relational model is not simply a complement to safe sport reform. It is woven into the very fabric of what makes reform last.
An Invitation to Re-Imagine
I have been asking powerful questions in sport for a long time. Here are the ones that matter most to me right now:
In what ways can we pursue podium excellence and prioritize the well-being of every person in our system? How might we measure culture alongside medals, holding both as expressions of what we value? What becomes possible when athletes, coaches, and leaders feel genuinely safe, seen, and relationally connected — not despite their pursuit of excellence, but as a foundation for it?
These questions are not in opposition to high performance. They are its deepest expression.
I am inviting sport leaders, coaches, and athletes to listen to Robert Digings' conversation on the Coaches Rising podcast and to sit with this honestly: how relational is our team, really? Not on the good days. On the hard ones. When there is pressure. When there is conflict. When someone needs to tell a difficult truth. When there is grief. When both poles of the performance-and-people polarity are asking to be honoured at the same time.
The Commission has given us a roadmap. The highly relational model gives us a way of being. My own work — in values-based leadership, Integral Coaching, cultural intelligence, and grief and loss literacy — has taught me that sustainable change always begins on the inside, in the quality of our inner and outer relationships, long before it shows up in structures, policies and outcomes.
Money. Medals. Morals. Not as competing priorities — as complementary ones. This is our new triple bottom line, and it is whole only when all three are held together.
Sport thrives when its people do. And its people thrive when they belong — truly, deeply, relationally — to something worth belonging to.
Invitation
If this resonates with you — if you feel the pull toward something more integrated, more human, and more sustainable than what we have been doing — I want to hear from you.
I am actively looking to partner with sport leaders who are ready to do this work. Leaders who understand that building a highly relational culture is not a distraction from high performance — it is high performance. Leaders who are willing to look honestly at their teams, measure what matters, and do the courageous inner and outer work that lasting change requires.
If you are ready to move beyond compliance toward genuine cultural transformation, beyond managing by objective toward managing by values, and beyond a singular focus on money and medals toward a triple bottom line that also honours the moral health of your organization — let's talk.
This is the work I have dedicated my career to. And I believe, with everything I have learned in thirty-five years of accompanying sport leaders through their most complex moments, that we are at a turning point. The roadmap exists. The framework exists. What we need now are brave, relational leaders who are willing to walk the path.
Reach out at dblaroche@sportlaw.ca. It is going to take a village — and I would love for you to be part of ours. ❤️
