Chris Gibson MBE has had quite the career, from climbing the ranks in the armed forces to implementing critical medical infrastructure in the centre of a warzone and an epidemic. Nowadays, he is putting that knowledge and experience to use at Bristol Rovers, where he was named a non-executive director in 2021.
His brief has been to mentor Rovers' key leaders, first-team manager Joey Barton – who first invited Gibson to the club to conduct a behind the scenes review of the Gas as they spiralled out of League One a year ago – and chief executive Tom Gorringe, in hope of making the club's playing and non-playing operations more efficient, aligned and connected. He also sits on the club's board, there to offer a more objective perspective and pose difficult questions.
The result of Gibson's initial review and Gorringe's appointment after Martyn Starnes' departure has been a sweeping change on the business side, with roles redefined and departments restructured, with the goal of leaving the "ragtag Rovers" label in the past. Their work remains in progress but they believe it is bearing fruit.
On the playing side, Barton is totally in charge, but Gibson believes steps are being taken consistently to make the football operation as efficient and effective as possible.
Bristol Live interviewed the army veteran to learn more about his work, the next steps, the state of the club when he arrived and the leadership qualities he sees in Gorringe and Barton.
For fans that don’t know your background and experiences, Chris, can you summarise your career to date and how it pertains to your work with Bristol Rovers?
I left school with no qualifications and I joined the army. Somehow, I managed to do OK in there and I ended up doing some specialist roles that kept me elevating within that organisation until I became reasonably senior and ended up with wider roles that were quite tricky to solve. In the middle of that, I got myself an education with a couple of master’s degrees and I went to Harvard.
I ended up initially as second in command of the world’s largest collective medical training capability, which was based up near York. It is quite a new concept of collective training. In the commercial world, everyone really just trains their people at the individual level and I’m not sure they are good at doing collective training, and it is the same in sport.
That collective training centre became responsible for the trauma pathways and trauma hospital in Afghanistan, which became the most successful medical capability in the history of medicine, so we knew we had something special in the methodology that we’ve designed around how to train and how to assure that training, so we understood where we were getting it right and protect that and we also understood where there were gains to be made.
Everyone talks about incremental gains and that’s what we did in defence medicine around the trauma system in Afghanistan to such an extent that the figures quoted at the end of the conflict in Afghanistan, any patient that went into that hospital had a 98.6 per cent chance of survival. Given the traumatic nature of the injuries that were being received, that was hugely impressive and the best in the history of medicine.
That challenge continued when Ebola raised its head in 2014-15 in West Africa and by that stage, I was running that organisation and I was given that task to lead the design and assurance of that capability as well.
From there, I was sent to a new innovation hub at Birmingham University to try and assist there, and from there I was sent by Defence to the Department of Health to help with London Ambulance Service, which had gone into special measures. We did a bit of a programme there, which helped, and then that task continued. I was asked by Rory Stewart MP to go to help with the culture of violence in prisons in England, which was quite an interesting project as well.
So I have done a lot of projects in public service. It grew from leaving school with nothing to somehow being on point for some quite chunky tasks.
The ‘so what?’ from that was I learned how a team works well and how an organisation can work well. From there, we could start seeing how that could translate into professional sport and Leaders in Sport reached in and asked me to tell a bit of that story because I’d had a bit of exposure from the Ebola thing and the Afghanistan piece.
They got interested in how we created those conditions for success and whether they could transfer across into professional sport. For me, that was really quite easy because only in professional sport and in the military do you really get a chance to prepare for engagement, have the encounter and then be able to reflect and train to be better next time.
I think there are three things that make this military stuff relevant in professional sport: competition, diffidence and glory. They are things that seem to sit really well in professional sport and translate across.
You’ve seen many times professional football leaning into the military to try to capture the ethos, but that tends to be around doing a log run or an assault course. That’s absolutely great for creating a bond through sharing adversity and it is really important to come together closer, but there is much more to it than that and that is what we’ve tried to do at Rovers.
We’ve tried to get a real understanding of where the club is because if you don’t understand the issue then you can’t close the gap. You will have seen the changes that have occurred around the club in the past six or seven months that have been significant.
We have tried to build both sides of the organisation and underpin it with a greater understanding of what a positive output is. All agreeing a set of values and behaviours that drive a higher level of performance wherever you are, whatever your role is within the club, but for me if it doesn’t exist everywhere there is a weakness and there is no excuse for a weakness when people are being employed and paid to work within a professional organisation. They should be delivering to the best of their ability.
That is the position that I have set out and I’m really pleased to see that moving in the right direction. I can see it all the time. We have created a momentum on and off the pitch that is visible so people can believe in it now. When we first started talking about it, it was not the case and it was not as visible, but now as the improvements are occurring, people have bought into it.
If they don’t buy into it, it stands out because we’re not allowing people to walk by sub-optimal performance anywhere.
It sounds like old management talk, but this is not theory. We have delivered this to a really high standard and that’s why I hope that happiness around The Quarters and the Mem hopefully distils and titrates into the players, and I think they are starting to feed off it.
I stay away from the players because that is Joey’s space and I don’t know anything about the tactics of football and I don’t pretend to try to even learn because that is not my role. My role is to provide mentorship and guidance to Tom (Gorringe) and Joe around organisational outputs.
In terms of your brief at Rovers, officially you are a non-executive director and part of the board?
Yes, but because of the size, there are occasions where it might drift into executive roles. But I am very content with that because I’m there to give my best effort as well, so it is not just sitting on a board and giving governance and assurance.
I’m very happy to get my hands dirty and be down in The Quarters giving presentations and holding workshops and focus groups, and the same with the business side. That is where my knowledge can help and that is what I try to do.
If we can align our staff to know what good looks like, we can absolutely get a greater amount of juice for the squeeze. We’re getting more output by everyone being aligned than before.
Since Joey Barton arrived at the club, he has spoken publicly quite a lot about the culture he inherited. You were first brought in about a year ago to do a report on the club as a fact-finding mission. What were your first impressions of Rovers and what did you see that was inefficient, not working properly and holding the club back?
If you say what you like about an organisation, it is usually the culture. It’s not usually the output, whatever the organisation is. If you try to understand what makes a culture up, you can start understanding where it may be falling short and where it may be winning.
What we did is try to understand the culture of the organisation when I went in, so you put the litmus paper into an organisation, pull it out and see where it is.
My assessment was that there was work to be done. I sat with Wael and we broadly agreed that there was work to be done and we set about that.
If you use the cultural paradigm to try to create a culture that is positive and magnetic for players and staff, you’re probably on a really good trajectory. So what are the rituals and routines, what is the structure, what are the processes and power structures, what are the stories and symbols within the organisation? What needs to be created? What needs to be changed? What needs to be reorganised? What needs to be simplified?
There is a lot of complexity to what some people perhaps might think is a simple task, but this is about people and we’ve got to get people positively engaged to deliver at the best level.
The three components of that are the physical, the conceptual and the moral piece. We have got a training ground that must be the best in the league. The pitches are amazing, the facilities are great. The physical assets, we’ve got in place now.
Conceptually, all the tactics, techniques and processes, we work hard on that. I have looked at every role within the organisation. Tom runs the ship and it’s his decision, but he understands as well as I do that there was work to be done around roles and responsibilities and clarifying outputs.
The moral component is really about moving to intrinsic motivation. What makes people want to come to be part of Bristol Rovers? Not the ‘ragtag Rovers’ strapline that I heard when I first arrived, I think that’s moved. I think we’ve moved that. The quality of the players we’re getting in, the quality of the training ground, the quality of the pitches we’re providing, the service we are giving, and the office space that Tom has had renewed for staff. It is in a different league than it was six or seven months ago when I first arrived.
We have done a lot in a really short period of time. For me, of course, success will only be evident through the results of the team, but if you don’t underpin it with the right things, it doesn’t really have a chance.
We think we are really underpinning the process really well now.
It is evident that you have done a lot of work so far. What do you think there is still left to improve at the club? What is next on the to-do list for you and Tom?
I can’t speak for Tom, it’s not appropriate for me to do so, but I think he will have his own ideas of where he would like to go and my role is to support him. We will have conversations and they are healthy.
For me, where I think we can go next is really learning from this season, whatever happens, by conducting a really deep lessons learned process about where our strengths lie and how we’ve got to protect those, and where we find areas for development and what we are going to do about that.
I know we’ve got five games to go and it’s all to play for, but I have everything crossed that we’ve got enough to get over the line, but even if we do get over the line we must conduct that piece of work because we’ve got to be better and stronger for whatever league we’re in next year.
It is a significant piece of work to do this. It is really looking at every aspect of the organisation and saying ‘How did we do?’
You think self-evaluation, regardless of outcome, is essential to any good level of performance, be it on an individual level or a group level?
We’ve got to be honest. We’ve got to be really honest about what we’re doing well and there are many things the club are doing well now, but it is a living, breathing organism and there is always work to do.
What we’ve always got to be is honest around that performance because if we’re not, we won’t be able to improve.
There are difficult conversations with staff around what has gone well and what could be better. It is something we are embracing now instead of hiding away from it, which in football is perhaps novel because it’s a very transient employment as a coach and to be able to highlight where we could be better probably doesn’t sit comfortably traditionally, I would suggest.
But we are being very open about this and I was speaking with Tom just last week about the end-of-season review and the lessons learned and how we’re going to do it and what the output of it would be.
It is something we would do in the military all the time and if you can create a culture of just wanting to be better and not being protective, you will find the gaps you can close off.
You have worked a lot with Tom Gorringe now. As someone who specialises in leadership, what do you think of his strengths as a leader?
I think we’re really lucky to have Tom. I think he is the youngest chief executive in professional football. That is a lot of responsibility for someone who is relatively young, but I think the potential, determination, vision and balance that he has is much more mature than someone that I would expect of that age.
What we needed was someone with drive and enthusiasm and the skills that Tom possesses, so I am absolutely delighted we have Tom in the organisation. It needed young vigour and drive to push the organisation forward.
When I walk around the club on matchdays, it feels very different than it did six months ago to me and he has created that.
He has appointed some good people, he has spent the time, he’s very supporter-focused and he understands the audience.
He is starting to make it magnetic and I think that is a really great thing, so I’m delighted we have Tom and he is one to watch for the future.
And Joey? He was one of the main reasons why you were introduced to the club in the first place. What do you believe are his strengths as a leader?
There is much written about Joe and Joe has a delightful side to him that I find very endearing. Of course, others may have a different opinion but I can only speak from the engagements I’ve had with him.
I think he has huge potential. I think he understands that he is also a work in progress and he is open to support and help in getting there.
His football knowledge is really deep and he’s getting better all the time.
My job is to help him when he needs it and we’ll have interesting conversations around that, but my conversations are about organisational leadership, not about his tactics. All the work is done for me when he gets onto the pitch with his players.
I sit way more in the background and it’s about how training sessions are planned, it’s about how debriefs are done, it’s about how we learn lessons and how the staff support him, understanding what the information requirements are so we can shape his team to meet the opposition best prepared.
I’m working a lot with staff to make sure he has the right information to make the right choices. The things I look at are training, equipment, personnel, infrastructure, tactics and how do we move from one match to another. What is the process of learning and preparing? How do we share that information and tell our players what is required of them? That is the bit I am interested in and then I absolutely stay out of it because it’s not appropriate for me to be involved because it’s not my skillset.
Obviously, the club has made sweeping changes not just as a result of what you have seen but what Tom has recognised as well. Have you been met by resistance along the way because you’re dealing with human beings and a lot of people don’t like change and may be set in their way of doing things? How do you overcome that without creating division?
Yes, is your answer, but that is very normal. In any change process, you have to acknowledge what proportion of resistance you have. Usually, it will be about five per cent that you will never be able to change and you just have to recognise it and that is the same for any change process that occurs.
What we’ve done is workshops with staff around embracing positive change. I have delivered those so people are fully conversant with what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re going to achieve it.
By getting ahead of it, it reduces the anxiety. If you can get staff to agree and shape the words and present the words that are important to them, you get much better buy-in, so we’ve been doing that and a workshop on positive change in the past two or three months for support staff to understand the process we are involved in.
I think that landed and we got really good feedback and staff asking to get the next one booked in, so it’s all about involving anyone on the journey. If the staff can create the narrative, it’s their journey, which I think is the most positive way to do it.
Going back to your question, yes, there has been resistance, but that is very normal, but we have lowered anxiety levels by involving all members of staff in the journey by allowing them to be involved and shape it as we are going through it.
You have brought in external influences for days and workshops, particularly around the first-team setup. Has that continued? Do you still get coaches from other organisations to come in and speak?
Obviously, COVID and the bubbles make it difficult for those that are involved in other teams to come and share with us, and they are involved in their seasons as well, so some of that direct contact has died away, but remote contact absolutely continues.
I speak with Kelly Brown of Saracens about their methodology and culture probably once a week. I speak with Leaders in Sport probably once a month. I work with a number of sport psychologists, both here and in Canada and gain as much knowledge about their successes to try to filter in as well.
I ran a course up in Yorkshire last week around creating world-class culture, where we had some guys from the club come up and participate in that. Why I wanted them to come is I had leaders from industry there as well. It’s all about sharing lessons and taking away the best components to embed them.
The sharing of success of building a culture was a really valuable exercise that I was lucky to chair.
These things help in cross-pollination and my hope is people from industry will listen to what Bristol Rovers have got to say and say ‘That’s brilliant, I’m going to take that into my organisation’.
I’m trying not to be linear in our thinking. Of course, not all of it maps across, but that’s not the idea. It is to give the coaching staff the opportunity to pick and mix what they want and try to embed it.
If you don’t do that, you’re very one-dimensional I think. It’s trying to give them a rich portfolio to consider when shaping how they want their team to operate and behave, what the philosophy of training is and the effort put in by players and staff. We’re pushing that all the time.
We want players to love to be with us. Look at Elliot Anderson and his parents. We spend time with them and we do the right thing by our people now. It’s not for me to say what happened before, but I know that we’re doing that now. He probably could have gone anywhere, but he’s chosen to spend his season with us. That’s helping us as a club and it’s helping our players as well.
People can see it is on the up and I genuinely believe that. I try to be as agnostic around this as I can because the more I’m in, the less impartiality I have. I really try to stand back as much as I can to give that impartial viewpoint because that’s the value that, hopefully, I can bring. When you’re too deep in it, you stop seeing the helicopter view and, for me, it’s really important I hold those conversations where I feel we can be better.
We’ve spoken a lot about professional things, but on a personal level are you enjoying your association with Bristol Rovers?
I’m loving it. It was really difficult at the start. I think the club was in a really difficult place and it was not heading in the right direction. To change the trajectory was a lot of work by all concerned and we are fantastically lucky to have someone who owns the club that puts faith in staff to deliver for him.
We are really lucky that we’ve got Tom, who is so talented and enthusiastic to start leading the organisation. I can see when I go in that staff really look up to him, so he’s got a real skillset to achieve that from members who are quite long in the tooth. He’s got great people skills.
Joe’s got the team performing exceptionally well and there is a real camaraderie around The Quarters training area now, which has taken a lot of work to get there, but all of it is really positive.
Of course, the measurement of success is getting promoted and we’re not quite there yet. It would be fantastic if we did, but let’s see.
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