Former runner and fitness coach David Arnfield reveals the whole-of-club buy-in to his Leading Teams program at Port Adelaide

When David Arnfield returned to Port Adelaide after a 10-year hiatus, senior coach Ken Hinkley challenged him in the boardroom upstairs at Alberton in the same way his old boss Mark Williams still does to this day.

Former Port Adelaide runner and fitness coach David Arnfield is back at Alberton as a Leading Teams facilitator. Picture: Stewart McLean.

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It was in the Port Adelaide boardroom upstairs at Alberton midway through last year when senior coach Ken Hinkley asked David Arnfield one key question.

Arnfield had not been back at the club for 10 years, since he was the on-field runner for Mark Williams, but now he was here as a facilitator for Leading Teams – a leadership and performance consultancy business with its roots in Australian football.

He’d already met with chief executive Keith Thomas which led to an agreement to run a high performance leadership program with the club’s top brass.

But over breakfast with football manager Chris Davies, Davies asked whether it could be broadened to include the coaching staff as well.

“I said ‘I’d love to but I need to talk to Ken first about what we’re doing and get that buy-in,” Arnfield said.

“That happened pretty quickly and my first meeting with Ken – I’d never met him before – but I was open and honest with him and he asked me in our initial meeting ‘I’ve seen this work in some clubs and not in others, why?’

“And it was a simple answer really, I said ‘it’s up to you, if the leaders of a team buy into it there’s a chance it will work, if you don’t then I can tell you now it won’t’.

“To his credit and everyone at Port Adelaide they have 100 per cent bought into what we’re doing.”

Mark Williams gives runner David Arnfield an instruction from the boundary line. Arnfield says the two have a strong relationship to this day.

Hinkley challenged Arnfield in the same way his old sparring partner ‘Choco’ still does to this day.

“Our relationship is really strong, we talk often,” Arnfield said of Williams.

“He questions some of the things that Leading Teams do and we have robust discussions, I think I’m winning the battle and getting him around, he likes some of it, not all of it.”

Once Hinkley was on board, Arnfield led Port Adelaide’s coaching staff on a two-day workshop at Mount Lofty House in the Adelaide Hills and now delivers that program weekly.

He’s also had Hinkley, Davies, Thomas and chairman David Koch in the one room together as part of a whole-of-club commitment to the Leading Teams program.

“The four pillars of a footy club – your president, CEO, coach, and football manager,” Arnfield said.

“Those four people were in a room and we discussed what their purpose was, why are you four here?

“It was a genuine conversation and it’s ongoing because relationships remain static unless you work at them.

“The question we ask if ‘how can we make this team better?’ because people look at their behaviour, if you’re trying to shift their behaviour and they don’t see it in you then good luck, and to their credit they’ve brought into it.”

Arnfield’s involvement at Port Adelaide goes back to 1980 when he was the under-17s fitness coach before becoming senior fitness coach in 1985.

Arnfield leads a running session in the early days at Alberton.

He eventually earnt a public reputation as a pesky on-field runner right up until when he left at the end of 2009 and spent the next nine years building a leadership business in Queensland.

In early January, 2019, he returned to Adelaide to work with Leading Teams which led to his appointment as Port Adelaide’s facilitator.

Leading Teams is operating as normal as possible during the AFL’s shutdown period but is not being paid by the clubs including Port Adelaide while the season is on hold.

The program is still running online with virtual meetings on Zoom allowing coaches and management to stay connected and navigate their challenges together.

Arnfield is yet to work with the players but says he feels like he is back home given his history with the club he grew up just a drop punt from.

“It has a strong culture, always has, the way we do things around here,” he said.

“There is a real glue there between what I spent 30 years doing at Port Adelaide with what we’re doing at Leading Teams.”

But that history with the club can also be Arnfield’s biggest challenge and like his time as a larger-than-life runner, he can overstep the mark.

“My biggest challenge working at Port Adelaide is I don’t work there any more, I’m not a staff member, I’m a facilitator for Leading Teams,” he said.

“And my challenge is I don’t have an opinion because as a facilitator I ask the questions … and I made it very clear at the beginning that was a challenge of mine.

“To the credit of the executives and Ken Hinkley, there’ve been times where we’ve been able to have discussions that they think maybe I’ve stepped the line, gone over the line and given my opinion.

“If a group gets stuck we’ll help them but we can’t tell them what to do, and that is my challenge because of my background, but the relationship we’ve been able to build is they can say ‘listen Arnie, that’s giving an opinion, that’s not asking questions’.

“I think they appreciate that vulnerability that I’m able to show by saying ‘if you think that I am (overstepping the mark) tell me’ and they do and they have, so the relationship is strong.”

Arnfield acknowledges there are some public misconceptions with Leading Teams including why they are at footy clubs or businesses in the first place and what they do.

“The connection some people make is ‘there must be something wrong if Leading Teams are coming in’ but it’s not around that at all,” Arnfield said.

Arnfield says his job is to ask questions, not give opinions, in his new role at the Power.

“We work with a client wanting to make them better, cultures aren’t broken when we go in, it’s looking at that (environment) and asking ‘can we do this better?’”

A criticism of the program is the belief it involves one person sitting in front of the group while everyone else circles around and tells them exactly what they think of them.

“That has been levelled, it’s not the first time we’ve heard that, and there are lot of ways to give feedback,” Arnfield said.

“If the relationships are strong enough, talking about what behaviours do we currently accept? You should be able to have those genuine conversations all the time, it doesn’t have to be in a formal setting.

“People who level that criticism generally haven’t been in the program, they might have heard about it, but there’s lots of different ways we give feedback and have genuine conversations.”

One of Arnfield’s first experiences in his return to Port Adelaide was accompanying the team on its pre-season trip to Maroochydore in December and he liked what he saw – as a fitness guru and leadership consultant.

“My first observation being an ex-phys-ed guy was how hard the players worked, they just got thumped, it was obviously bloody hot but three sessions a day they were getting smashed and they weren’t complaining about it,” he said.

“They were very tight and everything I’ve heard is they have a crack and really do care for each other.

“They’ve been doing some work with resilience, not with us, but in that space and you get a feeling … culture is around vibe and I knew Boaky, Robbie (Gray) and Westy and had a connection with some of the coaches (Chad Cornes, Montgomery, Schofield, Brogan), but apart from that I didn’t know anyone.

“And the way they took me in was again, another observation, I felt at home, like walking back home again straight away.”