--- title: "Tone from the Top: Why Sport Governance Starts with Your Chair" url: https://tidyhq.com/blog/tone-from-the-top-sport-governance-leadership date: 2026-04-01 updated: 2026-04-21 author: "Isaak Dury" categories: ["Governance", "Thought Leadership"] excerpt: "A chair who ignores the conflict of interest policy teaches the whole board that the policy is optional. Governance culture flows downhill." --- # Tone from the Top: Why Sport Governance Starts with Your Chair > A chair who ignores the conflict of interest policy teaches the whole board that the policy is optional. Governance culture flows downhill. ![Seward Park by Frank Stella, illustrating Tone from the Top: Why Sport Governance Starts with Your Chair](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/bp0k7h82/production/e4bb9eb5d05d9ddb3a32cb3b38442cd7c31ea646-400x308.jpg?w=1200&fm=webp) ## Key takeaways - The ISCA compliance framework puts 'tone from the top' alongside zero tolerance as the content foundation of governance - it is not optional, it is structural - A chair who ignores a conflict of interest policy teaches the entire board that policies are suggestions, not rules - In federated sport, tone has a distance problem - the chair is in the national office and the clubs are in suburbs across the country - Communication infrastructure determines whether leadership culture travels across a federation or dies in an email inbox - Proactive communication, small declarations of conflict, and visible adherence to process do more for governance culture than any policy document I was in a meeting last year with a state sporting body\. Twelve people around the table\. The chair needed to declare a conflict of interest on an agenda item \- a procurement decision involving a company where his brother\-in\-law worked\. Small conflict\. Barely material\. He declared it anyway\. Stood up, left the room, and waited in the corridor while the item was discussed and voted on\. When he came back, the secretary noted his absence and the reason in the minutes\. Nobody was surprised\. He did this every time\. It was just how things worked\. And that is tone from the top\. ## The concept The phrase comes from corporate compliance\. It shows up in anti\-corruption frameworks, financial regulation, and corporate governance codes\. The idea is simple: the ethical behaviour of an organisation is set by the people at the top of it\. Not by the policies they write\. By what they actually do\. The [Good Governance in Grassroots Sport](https://goodgovsport.eu/) project, a collaboration between [ISCA](https://www.isca-web.org/) and [Transparency International](https://www.transparency.org/) Germany, places tone from the top as the third element of their systematic approach to compliance \- right after the ethics code and zero\-tolerance commitments\. Their position is unambiguous: "Without the right 'tone from the top' an organisation will never adhere to its values\." That is a strong claim\. And having spent years working with sport organisations of every size, I think it understates the case\. An ethics code that the chair visibly follows becomes the culture\. An ethics code that the chair ignores becomes wallpaper\. ## What tone actually looks like It is not speeches at the AGM about integrity and values\. Nobody changes their behaviour because the president said "governance matters" in the annual report\. Tone from the top is behavioural\. It is the accumulation of small decisions made visibly\. A president who declares a conflict of interest \- even a trivial one \- teaches the board that declaration is normal, not dramatic\. A chair who insists on proper minutes, even for informal meetings, teaches the committee that documentation is a habit, not a burden\. A CEO who shares the federation's financials proactively, before anyone asks, teaches the organisation that transparency is the default, not a concession\. And the reverse is equally true\. A chair who rushes through conflict of interest declarations teaches the board they are a formality\. A president who communicates only during crises teaches clubs that silence means everything is fine\. A board member who waves away a minor procedural concern teaches everyone that process is optional when it is inconvenient\. Dorte With of DGI in Denmark made this point during the ISCA research \- boards need a common direction, and that direction is set by the person holding the gavel\. When the chair treats governance as an obligation to endure rather than a practice to model, the entire board follows\. ## Why this matters more in sport In a corporation, tone from the top is reinforced by professional incentives\. Employees follow the CEO's lead because their careers depend on it\. Compliance teams audit behaviour\. HR tracks training completion\. There are structural mechanisms that carry the tone through the organisation\. In volunteer sport, none of that infrastructure exists\. There is no HR department\. There is no compliance team\. There are no professional consequences for ignoring a policy\. The only mechanism that carries governance culture through a volunteer committee is social norms \- the unwritten rules about how things are done here\. And social norms are set by whoever is most visible\. In a club, that is the chair\. In a federation, that is the president or CEO\. When the most visible person in the organisation takes governance seriously, it becomes the social norm\. When they do not, no policy document can compensate\. ## The distance problem This is where it gets complicated for federated sport\. A single\-club chair can model governance culture directly\. They are in the room\. The committee sees what they do\. The social norm propagates by proximity\. But a national federation chair is not in the room\. They are in an office \- or more likely at their own kitchen table \- hundreds of kilometres from the clubs where governance actually happens\. Between the national chair and a suburban club committee, there are state bodies, regional associations, and layers of volunteer administrators who may or may not share the same governance instincts\. How does tone travel that distance? It does not travel by policy document\. I have seen federation after federation produce beautifully written governance frameworks, email them to every club, and achieve precisely nothing\. The documents sit in inboxes\. The club secretary who was supposed to distribute them has changed roles since the email was sent\. The new secretary doesn't know the document exists\. It does not travel by annual conference keynotes\. The president speaks about governance at the annual general meeting\. The audience nods\. Everyone goes home\. Nothing changes at club level because the people who need to hear the message were not in the room\. Tone travels by structured, repeated communication to the right people\. ## Making tone visible across a federation There are two parts to this: what you communicate and how you communicate it\. The what is about consistency and specificity\. Not "governance matters" \- that is empty\. Instead: "Here is our updated conflict of interest template\. Here is what our board did last month when a conflict arose\. Here is why we handled it this way\." Concrete examples\. Named decisions\. Visible adherence to the process the federation is asking clubs to follow\. The how is about infrastructure\. And this is where most federations fail \- not for lack of intent, but for lack of tools\. Email to a general inbox does not work because the person who needs to read the message is rarely the person who manages the inbox\. A governance update sent to info@clubname\.com\.au has a near\-zero chance of reaching the treasurer who needs to read it, the safeguarding officer who needs to act on it, or the president who needs to model it\. What works is role\-based communication\. The safeguarding update goes to safeguarding officers\. The financial compliance reminder goes to treasurers\. The governance culture message from the federation chair goes to club chairs and presidents\. Not to generic inboxes\. To the people in the specific roles who need to receive it\. This is the problem [TidyConnect](/tidyconnect) was built to address\. It lets governing bodies communicate directly to club\-level officers by role \- so when a federation chair sends a message about governance expectations, it reaches every club chair in the network, not a general inbox\. When a compliance deadline approaches, the reminder goes to the people responsible for meeting it\. When a policy is updated, acknowledgement tracking shows who has received and read it, and who hasn't\. But the technology is only the carrier\. The signal still has to come from the top\. ## The chair's responsibilities If you are the chair or president of a sport organisation at any level \- club, regional, state, national \- there are specific things that set the tone\. **Declare conflicts first\.** Before asking the committee to follow the conflict of interest policy, follow it yourself\. Publicly\. Even for small conflicts\. Especially for small conflicts\. The visible declaration of a minor conflict teaches the committee that the threshold for declaration is low, not high\. **Communicate proactively\.** Do not wait for the AGM or for a crisis\. Regular, brief updates on what the board is doing and why signal that transparency is a practice, not an event\. A monthly email from the chair to club presidents costs almost nothing and does more for governance culture than any training program\. **Follow the process when it is inconvenient\.** This is the real test\. When a decision needs to be made quickly and the proper process would slow things down, the temptation is to bypass it\. Resist\. Every time you follow the process when it is inconvenient, you teach the organisation that the process is real\. Every time you bypass it, you teach the organisation that the process is optional\. **Model documentation\.** If the minutes are supposed to record decisions, make sure your decisions are recorded\. If policies are supposed to be reviewed annually, review yours on schedule\. If conflict declarations are supposed to be in writing, put yours in writing\. **Respond to reports\.** When someone raises a concern \- about a financial irregularity, a safeguarding issue, a procedural breach \- how you respond sets the tone for whether anyone will raise a concern again\. Take it seriously\. Follow the process\. Report back on what happened\. If the concern is dismissed or ignored, the next person will not bother reporting\. ## The gap between intention and visibility Most chairs and presidents I have worked with have excellent intentions\. They believe in good governance\. They would follow the right process if asked\. The problem is not intent\. It is visibility\. A chair who declares a conflict of interest in a meeting that only five committee members attend has set the tone for five people\. A federation president who communicates governance expectations by email to a distribution list that nobody reads has set the tone for nobody\. The question is not whether your leaders have the right values\. It is whether those values are visible to the people who need to see them\. In a single club, visibility is a matter of attendance\. In a federation, visibility is a matter of infrastructure \- whether you have the communication channels to make leadership behaviour visible across dozens or hundreds of autonomous organisations\. The [ISCA](https://www.isca-web.org/) framework is clear that tone from the top and zero tolerance together form the content foundation of compliance\. Ethics codes are the aspirational layer\. Risk analysis is the analytical layer\. Structure and guidelines are the procedural layer\. But without leadership that visibly models the behaviour the organisation expects, all of those layers sit on sand\. Your governance is only as strong as what your chair does when nobody is watching \- and in federated sport, the problem is that almost nobody is watching\. Fix the visibility\. The tone will follow\. ## References - ISCA & Transparency International Germany\. [Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport](https://www.isca-web.org/files/GGGS_Web/Guidelines_for_Good_Governance_in_Grassroots_Sport.pdf) \(PDF\)\. Tone from the Top\. - Sport England & UK Sport\. [A Code for Sports Governance](https://www.sportengland.org/funding-and-campaigns/code-sports-governance)\. Board leadership\. - IOC\. [Basic Universal Principles of Good Governance](https://www.olympics.com/ioc/integrity/universal-principles-for-integrity)\. - Institute of Directors\. [IoD](https://www.iod.com/)\. Board leadership and culture\. - Transparency International\. [Global Corruption Report: Sport](https://www.transparency.org/en/publications/global-corruption-report-sport)\. 2016\. - NCVO\. [Governance Guidance](https://www.ncvo.org.uk/help-and-guidance/governance/)\. --- Header image: *Seward Park* by Frank Stella, via [WikiArt](https://www.wikiart.org/en/frank-stella) --- Canonical: https://tidyhq.com/blog/tone-from-the-top-sport-governance-leadership | Retrieved from: https://tidyhq.com/blog/tone-from-the-top-sport-governance-leadership.md | Published by TidyHQ (https://tidyhq.com)