Culture drives performance: Three lessons from Tennis Australia

We gave three people who perform under pressure for a living 40 questions each. With no scripts and no do overs.

It’s 40 / Love, Culture Amp's video series with Tennis Australia, and it started with a simple bet: that what makes a tennis team perform isn't so different from what makes any team perform. Three conversations in, we think we were right. Here's what each of them taught us.

Chris Mahony: Consistency beats inspiration

As head of the National Tennis Academy at Tennis Australia, Chris Mahony has spent his career building the system behind the player. He has previously won the Culture Amp Coaching Excellence – Performance award and stepped in as interim Billie Jean King Cup coach, work that also helped shape Maya Joint's rise through the ranks.

When you ask him what he brings to the court every day, Chris doesn't talk about talent. He talks about organization, standards, and knowing what’s likely to happen tomorrow. “I'll give them honesty,” he says, “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” Not because it feels good, but because the gap between winning and losing usually comes down to a couple of small, fixable things.

That's the job description for a lot of managers too. Not the person who delivers one great result. The person who makes good results ordinary, day after day, through the boring, repeatable stuff: clear standards, honest feedback, consistent follow-through.

Sam Stosur: Leadership is a daily habit

Sam Stosur's résumé speaks for itself: a US Open singles title, years inside the world's top ten, and now Australia's Billie Jean King Cup captain.

We caught up with Sam at the National Tennis Center ahead of a training session. Ask her what changed when she swapped playing for coaching, and she talks about how she spends her precious attention. "As a player, you're really focused on what you have to do to play your match," she says. "Now I'm thinking about five different players, what I think they need to do, how we get that for them... instead of thinking about it just for myself, now I try and think about it for five different people."

The qualities she asks of herself as captain are the same ones she'd want in any manager: "The players have really got to trust you. Being able to pass on that knowledge in a really constructive and productive way. Someone who's easy to talk to and has the ability to listen."

Maya Joint: One thing at a time, forever

“We’re at Wimbledon today.” 

We caught up with Maya during Wimbledon, catching her right before a practice session. Maya’s rise has been fast: from Australia's highest-ranking woman player to a win over Serena Williams at this very tournament.

You're not going to improve without feedback," she says. Though, she'd rather hear it a little after the match than in the raw minutes right afterward, usually going over the video with her coaches. When she's working on something, she keeps it narrow: "I'll try and pinpoint exactly what I need to fix, and then slowly put all the rest together."

It's a habit she picked up from the people around her. Her Billie Jean King Cup captain, Sam Stosur, talked her through a rough patch with a version of the same idea: "Each match is a new opportunity." Progress, for Joint, is one adjustment at a time, match after match.

Why this checks out

Culture Amp's own People Science backs up what Chris, Sam, and Maya each describe in their own way.

Employees under a high-performing leader are 4.5 times more likely to be high-performing themselves. That's Mahony's point about consistency, showing up in the data: coaching as infrastructure, not a one-off pep talk.

High performers are 12% more satisfied with the quality of feedback they get from their manager. That's Joint's point exactly: you don't improve without it.

Employees who feel their role is a great fit are 48% more likely to become high-performing. That lines up with what Stosur is building in the room: not talent alone, but the right conditions around it.

From locker room to boardroom, the ingredients are the same: trust, clarity, and leaders who bring out the best in the people around them. Watch the full 40 / Love series and see how Culture Amp and Tennis Australia are proving that culture isn't the soft stuff. It's the whole game.