The Danger of Ignoring Perception in High Performance
What England Rugby, the media and one of rugby’s biggest scandals reveal about reputation and PR.
Elite environments often make a simple mistake.
They assume performance will speak for itself.
Inside the team, the work feels obvious. Preparation is meticulous. Decisions are deliberate. Standards are clear. Everyone involved understands what is trying to be built.
But outside the environment, none of that context is visible.
All people see are moments.
Results.
Interviews.
Headlines.
And from those fragments, a story begins to form.
If that story drifts too far from what the organisation believes is actually happening, something dangerous develops.
Performance may still be improving.
But the perception of performance begins to deteriorate.
Once that gap opens, it becomes extremely difficult to close.
When the narrative becomes the performance
England Rugby’s defeat to Italy last weekend offered a useful example.
The reaction was immediate. Commentators searched for explanations. Supporters voiced frustration. Former players offered analysis.
Some of that response focused on the result itself.
But much of it centred on something less tangible.
The narrative that has been building around England.
The rugby is widely perceived as cautious.
The team appears uncertain of its identity.
The coach is often described as uninspiring.
Whether that picture is entirely accurate is almost beside the point.
Because once perception settles in the public imagination, every new moment begins reinforcing it.
A narrow defeat confirms decline.
A tactical decision becomes evidence of stubbornness.
A guarded interview reinforces the image of a defensive coach.
Performance inside the environment may be evolving.
But outside it, the narrative has already begun to harden.
And once perception becomes the dominant story, it starts shaping how performance itself is judged.
Former England coach Eddie Jones once captured this dynamic with typical bluntness:
“You are never quite as bad as the media and the fans are telling you. And you are never, ever as good as the media and the fans are telling you.”
It was a simple observation, but an accurate one.
Public judgement rarely sits comfortably in the middle.
When messaging drifts from reality
The tension between perception and messaging was visible again after the Italy defeat.
England’s Ben Earl suggested the team had actually played pretty well.
For some supporters that comment felt disconnected from what they had just watched.
But it is worth understanding where that type of response often comes from.
Elite athletes are not trained to sit in disappointment or publicly dismantle themselves after defeat. Inside high-performance environments that kind of thinking is rarely productive. Players are taught to analyse events quickly, extract lessons and move forward.
The challenge is that communication in elite sport serves more than one audience.
It serves the group inside the environment.
And it serves the people watching from outside it.
Supporters watching that match experienced something very different.
They watched England lose control of the final quarter.
They watched Italy make history.
They watched a match slip away.
When the language used inside a team drifts too far from what people feel they have just witnessed, something subtle begins to happen.
A gap opens.
Not a performance gap.
A credibility gap.
And credibility, once weakened, is extremely difficult to rebuild.
The relationship sport often misunderstands
At this point the media are often blamed.
Journalists are accused of exaggerating narratives or chasing controversy.
Sometimes those criticisms are fair.
But the relationship between teams and journalists is more complex than that.
Narratives in sport rarely appear from nowhere.
They form through a combination of three things:
information
relationships
access
Reporters need stories. They work under pressure to explain events quickly. In an environment as emotionally charged as elite sport, strong narratives are inevitable.
The organisations that navigate this dynamic best understand something important.
The press are not simply observers of elite sport.
They are part of the ecosystem that shapes how sport is experienced.
Treat that ecosystem with hostility and the narrative will develop without you.
Engage with it intelligently and the conversation becomes more balanced.
This is not about spin.
It is about understanding the environment you operate within.
What a rugby scandal taught me about reputation
My understanding of how powerful perception can become was shaped by an experience earlier in my career.
At the time I was working inside a professional rugby environment when the club became caught up in one of the biggest drug scandals the sport had seen.
Several players were accused of using prohibited substances and refusing drug tests. The story spread rapidly across national newspapers and speculation quickly filled the gaps where information was missing.
Journalists were calling constantly. Every few hours seemed to produce another headline.
Inside the club the instinct was familiar.
Say nothing.
Avoid the press.
Hope the story fades.
But silence rarely protects reputation.
In fact, silence often allows the narrative to expand in directions you cannot control.
Eventually we made a different decision.
Instead of retreating from the media, we invited them in.
Senior players sat down with journalists and spoke openly about what had happened, the mistakes that had been made and what they were going to do to repair the damage done to the team and to the sport.
It required significant trust from the players.
But something important happened.
The narrative shifted.
The story moved away from speculation and towards accountability.
That moment reinforced something I have believed ever since.
Reputation is rarely shaped by performance alone.
It is shaped by how people understand what they are seeing.
Mission. Values. Perception.
Over time I began to think about this dynamic through a simple framework.
In high-performance environments three elements always sit together.
Mission
What are you trying to achieve?
Values
What will never be compromised?
Perception
How must people experience you if you are succeeding?
Most organisations spend significant time defining mission and values.
Very few think clearly about perception.
But perception determines whether people trust what they are seeing.
Ignore it and a narrative will form anyway.
Usually without you.
The lesson beyond sport
Elite sport simply makes these dynamics easier to see.
The scrutiny is constant.
The emotions are intense.
The consequences arrive quickly.
But the underlying lesson applies far beyond rugby.
Inside organisations, leadership teams and professional environments the same pattern appears repeatedly.
When what leaders say begins to drift too far from what people experience in reality, trust weakens.
Once credibility begins to erode, every message that follows is interpreted through that growing scepticism.
Performance still matters.
But ignoring perception means performance may never be judged on its own terms.
And in high-performance environments, that is a risk few organisations can afford.
If you’re interested in the intersection between performance, reputation and leadership, I’ll continue exploring the lessons elite sport offers beyond the field here.