Simon Hartley
Most leadership teams understand what good looks like. The harder question is what separates good teams from the small number that perform at the top of their field when the pressure is on and the conditions are hostile. The answer rarely lives in the org chart or the strategy deck. It lives in habits of mind, behaviour and culture that have to be deliberately built.
Simon Hartley is a sport psychology consultant and high-performance coach who helps leadership teams build the mental habits, team behaviours and culture that separate good organisations from world-class ones.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Simon Hartley
- Nearly three decades inside elite sport, including Premier League football, the English Institute of Sport, Olympic teams and the Fijian rugby 7s programme, give him a working library of what world-class actually looks like in practice.
- He treats mindset and culture as engineered outcomes, not motivational ideas, with a published body of work (twelve books including Peak Performance Every Time and Stronger Together) that gives buyers a concrete intellectual product to point at.
- His client list crosses sectors that rarely share a stage, from Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest and The North Face to Bayer Leverkusen, FC Bayern Munich and Team GB, which makes the translation from sport to business credible rather than asserted.
- Founder of Be World Class and co-founder of Success Engineers, he runs a long-form consulting practice alongside the keynote work, so what audiences hear has been tested with the same leadership teams he later embeds with.
Biography highlights
- Founder of Be World Class (2008) and co-founder of Success Engineers (2017).
- Former Consultant Sports Psychologist, English Institute of Sport; former Head of Sport Science, Sunderland AFC.
- Author of twelve books on performance, character, teams and hiring, including Peak Performance Every Time, Stronger Together and How to Develop Character.
- Worked with Olympic teams, Premier League clubs, Bundesliga sides (including Bayer Leverkusen and FC Bayern Munich), the Fijian rugby 7s programme, and Formula One.
- Corporate clients include Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest and The North Face.
- Featured in Personnel Today, Management Today, The Times and Bundesliga Weekly; on-screen consultant for the Fiji Time documentary series.
Biography
Elite sport offers a controlled study in performance. The conditions are public, the consequences are immediate, and the gap between teams that win consistently and teams that almost win is usually invisible to outsiders. Simon Hartley has spent close to thirty years inside that gap. He held senior roles at the English Institute of Sport and Sunderland AFC, worked across Premier League football, the Bundesliga, Olympic programmes and Formula One, and was part of the support team behind the Fijian rugby 7s side that became one of the most-watched sporting stories of recent years.
In 2008 he founded Be World Class to apply what he had learned in those environments to organisations outside sport. The premise is straightforward. World-class performance is not a personality trait or a slogan. It is a set of habits, behaviours and cultural conditions that can be identified, taught and reinforced. His work for Adidas, GE, Siemens, Sky, NatWest, The North Face and others tests that premise against the practical questions senior leaders actually ask, about teams, hiring, character, and decision-making under load.
Across twelve books, including Peak Performance Every Time, Stronger Together, How to Develop Character and Hire Great People, he has built a body of work that takes the language of elite sport and translates it into something a board or an executive committee can use. The books are short, deliberately, because they are written to be read by people who already have a day job. He has been featured in Personnel Today, Management Today, The Times and Bundesliga Weekly, and is a regular on-screen contributor to sports documentary work.
The throughline in his speaking is a refusal to treat mindset as a soft topic. Resilience, character, team chemistry and culture are presented as variables that leaders can shape with the same discipline they apply to revenue and operations. That framing is why his audiences tend to leave with a checklist, not a feeling.
Key speaking topics
- World-class team performance
- Winning mindset and mental toughness
- Resilience and performance under pressure
- Values-driven culture and leadership
- Hiring for character
- Sustaining high performance in volatile conditions
Ideal for
- Senior leadership teams and executive committees aiming to lift their performance ceiling, not their average
- CHROs and people leaders responsible for team performance, culture and hiring practice
- Sales and commercial leadership teams operating in high-pressure markets
- Conference audiences of senior leaders looking for substance behind the language of resilience and high performance
Audience outcomes
- A clear distinction between good, great and world-class as operating standards, and what separates them in practice
- A working understanding of the behaviours and conditions that build resilient, high-performing teams
- Specific reference points from elite sport that translate to commercial settings, not analogies for their own sake
- A view of culture and mindset as engineered outcomes that leaders can influence directly
- Language and frameworks senior teams can take back into their own performance conversations
Talks
The essential ingredients of teams that perform consistently in volatile environments, drawn from elite sport and tested in corporate settings.
Key takeaways:
- What separates world-class teams from merely good ones at the level of behaviour, not values statements
- How resilient teams handle uncertainty, setbacks and changing conditions
- The conditions leaders need to build for high performance to become repeatable
The mindset, leadership and team shifts required when an organisation has stopped underperforming and now wants to set the standard.
Key takeaways:
- Why the move from great to world-class is a different problem from the move from good to great
- The specific leadership habits that hold organisations at “great” and prevent the next step
- How elite sports teams sustain dominance once they reach the top
The components of a performance mindset and how to embed it across an organisation rather than rely on individual motivation.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between motivation as a feeling and mindset as a discipline
- How winning mindsets are built into culture, hiring and day-to-day behaviour
- Where most organisations leak performance through mindset rather than capability