Guest: Dr. Xavier Thompson, Assistant Professor, LSU School of Kinesiology
Host: Lacy Dicharry, Senior Director & Executive Coach, LSU Leadership Development Institute
Published: August 18, 2026
Run time: 30:32
You can never prove you prevented an injury, because if you do it right, nothing happens. Dr. Xavier Thompson studies ACL injuries and how to keep them from occurring, and the same problem can happen within teams in the workplace: If we put great things in place to prevent situations from happening, how do we know if it’s actually working?
He talked with Lacy Dicharry about what a mentor told him about the things only he can do, why he asks everyone joining a research team what they want out of it, and the seven o’clock laptop rule he gave himself.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: You always think, I can do this and I can do this well. But I'm trying to do everything that I'm doing well, and eventually there is a balancing point. I think that was my trouble with delegation, thinking, I can do more. But should I do more?
Lacy Dicharry: [introduction] Welcome to Teams That Win, a podcast from the Leadership Development Institute at Louisiana State University, where we explore what makes teams win and get to sit down and talk with leaders who help get those teams there. I'm Lacy Dicharry, Senior Director of LDI, and today I am joined by Dr. Thompson, who is an Assistant Professor at LSU. He works on athletic performance and [injury] prevention, with a background in athletic training and a PhD Kinesiology with a focus in Sports Medicine from the University of Virginia. What was fascinating about the conversation was how much [an ACL rupture] has in common with ruptures in the workplace. What we can do to prevent them, what we can do to repair when it does happen. But really, how do we invest in delegation for our team, to make sure that we have the best team possible to perform at our highest level.
Welcome.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: Thanks for having me.
Lacy Dicharry: Yeah, excited you're here. I love talking about performance. Companies always want to know, how can we do better? What can we do to maximize performance, help people achieve? And there's a lot that goes into it.
Before we jump in, can you just give a brief overview? What is kinesiology, and what do you study? Tell me about you.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: Great question. People go, like, I want to be a trainer. But no, it's the study of human movement. We cover a lot of things. From your youth athlete to astronauts, to people who just struggle with [movement] function in general.
I specifically study athletic people in terms of [ACL injuries] and, in general, lower extremity injury risk, and a little bit of sport performance [as well].
Lacy Dicharry: Yeah, we could talk a lot about that, because I've had two ACL surgeries.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: We can talk about that all day.
Lacy: Yeah. And one was in soccer, and one was in a takedown in MMA.
Dr. Thompson: Interesting. Same [injury], different [mechanisms].
Lacy: What I found about that whole journey of injury to recovery: I did not anticipate the toll, the mental health toll, that that recovery process would take.
Dr. Thompson: Yes. And so many people ignore that piece, because you think, all right, I hurt this thing, I just need to fix that. But it's so much beyond the physical. It is literally what your identity is wrapped up in. And we have the research to show your brain actually [rewires] a little bit after these injuries. There's so much to overcome.
Lacy: That explains a lot. It took about six weeks for me to come out of this really dark spot after my second surgery.
Can you say a little bit more about some of the findings that you have discovered through your research that might be related to leaders across Louisiana?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: A great question. What we see following ACL injury is, there is the pain. Your muscles literally shut down, and we have to work so hard to overcome those things. And that's not just your basic strength. Reading your muscle, it's literally different. We can do our best to overcome that, and we know a lot of ways to do that after injury.
But so much of our work has become focused on preventing injury. And I think when we think about teams, it's a lot of similar focus, where you want to try to build the team up before you have something that goes wrong. Because inevitably there will be. But the better the infrastructure, it's going to be a stronger team. If you have good movement patterns, good strength, and [security] before your injury, you have a much better chance of returning to that form after.
Lacy Dicharry: I love that so much. You said a few things. Number one, there's the pain, and I think we all know pain. Especially, you have a rupture or a conflict or something at work or with one of your teammates.
I think what happens a lot of the time is you ignore it, both with our body and with our teammates. And then you have the shutdown. I'm not talking to this person. But also, my body just shuts down. I'm not going to think about it, because I don't have time to slow down and deal with the pain. I'm going to keep going. And then that causes a lot more problems than if we had just stopped and dealt with it in the moment.
What I love about what you said next is, you have to work to overcome it, and there is special training required after, because the muscle itself is different. I want to dig in here a little bit, because that's what I've seen with teams. There's a rupture, then the team is different, the relationship is different. And so that requires different training, different exercises or skills or insights to be able to recover from that.
Walk me through, what does that look like in your experience and the teams that you've led? Tell me about that.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: I would say one of the biggest learning curves for me has been communication. We talk about it, but what that actually means, and something I've learned a lot, is clarifying people's roles on a team versus expectations. That's important up and down the chain.
I've been in positions where I thought I had a certain role, and maybe [I] outperformed that role, and I wasn't necessarily happy with the output that came from it. And vice versa.
So I've learned, going into a team, when you're bringing people together, you're asking those questions. All right, what do you want to get out of this? What do you expect to do? And you clarify those things up front. It's far different than waiting until the end, and someone's upset with what they don't get, but you were just on two different pages to begin with.
Lacy Dicharry: A lot of prevention of rupture is communication. Setting expectations, being clear about what is important. I find that people think that they're clear and they're not. One of my favorite [lines] from one of our leadership coaches at LDI is that the biggest myth of communication is that it actually happened. That shows up quite a bit.
When you think about prevention, just say a little bit about what prevention is and what it actually looks like in practice. And then we'll go into, what does prevention look like in teams?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: In terms of ACL injury, a lot of the focus is: how are you moving, and how do you [load]? Those are really [broad], and we go into far more about those. But essentially what we're trying to do is look at what we know are associated factors. We have seen, over and over, [factors] associated with higher risk of injury, and [we] work on strength patterns.
We remove certain things, like your knee moving in a certain way during certain motions. And I'm making it sound really simple. It's far more complicated than that, because what if that movement pattern is associated with injury, but it might make you a little bit better at your sport? You think that's how you've moved for so long, you don't know how to move in a different way. And so a lot of it is that cost benefit.
And I focus on the [ACL], but I look at a lot of other injuries too. And trust me, there's a lot of joints in the human body, and there's a lot of injuries associated with all of them. It sounds really simple, but it is really focusing on: what is the most important thing? What are the most high leverage things? And what matters to me clinically, but also to coaches, to parents, to athletes, all the stakeholders involved, because we all have a voice in this.
Lacy Dicharry: Yeah. And I would say one of the most surprising things is, okay, I tear my ACL and I get it repaired and I'm going to do all this work. But they're not even dealing with the knee. It's focusing on some of the muscles that wrap around the knee. It's focusing on strength, focusing on [the hip]. Which is way far away from the knee.
It's so important to have an expert who understands the entire system, and not just trying to solve the problem at face level.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: I would say it's really a team approach. When you think about it, you get injured and you're probably going to see an orthopedic surgeon whose expertise is the surgery, and they reconstruct that ligament. But then you also go through the rehab process, and that's when you bring in maybe your physical therapist or athletic trainer. Maybe you get closer to [return and] there's a strength coach, and they are going to have their own [expertise].
It's important that you get that multifactorial team who understands: hey, [we] need to work on the quad sets, because they're going to shut down. [We] need to work on the hamstrings, the adductors, the abductors, because they're going to support the entire structure. Because you have so much to work on.
And someone who understands, oh, there's a little bit of a mental component. Who's worried about the mental health? Who's worried about not just making the muscle stronger, but restoring that connection between the brain and the muscle? It's funny, we don't necessarily think of health care like that at all times, but that is very much a team approach.
Lacy Dicharry: Yeah, I'm hearing team approach, and it really requires a lot of different people working together. I'm also hearing systems approach in what you're sharing.
One of the basic tenets of leadership and human resources development theory is systems theory. If you move something over here, something over here is going to shift. And so for leaders, what we talk about is, it's so important to understand a zoomed out perspective. You've got to understand all the components, how they operate together, and how they influence each other across a system.
One of the things that we at LDI do is, we come into an organization and we do an organizational needs assessment. It's like a diagnosis for what's happening in the organization. A lot of people think training is the answer. We just need to train on this one thing and then we'll be good.
And I love this meme that was shared, athletes versus organizations. For athletes: you train, train, train, train, train, perform. Train, train, train, train, train, perform. Most of your time is spent training. In organizations, you perform, perform, perform, perform, and then you have like one day of training, and that's it.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: I've never thought about it that way, but that's very accurate.
Lacy: When we think about, how do we actually prevent rupture in teams? How do we actually build up the capacity and the strength that we need to prevent rupture? We talk about this with different groups. But what does that look like in an organization? We need to build up the people on the team and the system around the team. Sometimes it's the organization itself.
What does that look like from a systems perspective? What do leaders really need to keep in mind based on what you've learned?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: I think you have to be able to almost remove yourself from a situation sometimes, and look at yourself as a separate person as part of that team, and think through everyone's strengths and weaknesses. I know my own strengths and weaknesses very well, because I've been honest with myself about it.
And funny enough, one of the hardest things for me historically has been delegation. As I've continued to do more and grow and do more things, I realize I have to empower [members] of my team to do other things. And so I look at my strengths and weaknesses along with theirs and see, okay, where can I improve, where can I help them improve, and if there's something that needs to get done, how can I do it?
A mentor of mine essentially sat me down once and he said, your job as a leader is to figure out what are the things that only you can do, versus what are the things others can do. It's easy to get into a place where you think, I can do it all. But I need to focus my energy on the things that only I can do, so I can prepare the rest of my team to do those things that they can do. And if I don't do that, I'm doing them a [disservice], and I'm not going to build a cohesive environment around me.
Lacy Dicharry: Absolutely. Delegation is one of the most common topics I get when I do executive leadership coaching. And what I've found is there's several reasons why delegation is hard. Some of it is the skill set and the process of understanding how to do it. Most of it is the emotional component. There's some emotional component that makes it hard.
However, like we were talking about with systems theory: if we put too much pressure on one part of the system, it's going to break, and that's going to impact everything else. And so as leaders, if we're taking on all that pressure ourselves and we aren't learning how to distribute it in an appropriate way across the system, we are going to break.
Tell me a little bit about what you have learned about delegation. What has made it hard for you, and how have you overcome that?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: I think, like you said, there's an emotional component to it. And what made it hard for me is, I had to say, I need to start evaluating myself more objectively.
You always think, I can do this and I can do this well. But I'm trying to do everything that I'm doing well, and eventually there is a balancing point. There's a finite amount of resources when you talk about an individual person. There's only so much time and energy I have. I think that was my trouble with delegation, thinking, I can do this, I'll take on more and more.
And as I started to do more honest assessment and think about, okay, I can do more, but should I do more? And also, as I brought more people aboard, I realized, you're bringing these people on because you think they're capable.
One thing I do before I bring anyone onto a research team, anything I'm involved in, is I like to have a conversation. It doesn't have to be long, but some type of meeting where I ask them, well, why did you want to be part of this? What do you want to get out of it? And that's a learning that you can always circle back to, saying, okay, this is what they want, this is their [goal], how can I help them get to what they need?
And as you delegate, you obviously start small. You start with [something manageable] and what you think is realistic for that person. And sometimes you'll learn far more about them. You'll learn where the edges of their ability are, and if it's a little bit too much, you should be there to step in early. But as they continue to gain trust, you continue to give them more leeway.
And the more I've taken that step back and taken the steps to do that, I've seen an undergraduate do amazing things that I thought were graduate level. I've seen people rise to challenges I never really thought that they would be able to. Not because they weren't capable, but because I had never given them space to say, someone else can do this just as well as I can. And honestly, that's freed me up to do even more of the things that I think only I can do. And so in the end, while it may have taken a little bit more startup time, it's [helped] the team so much [more] as a whole.
Lacy Dicharry: I think there's several lessons that we can take from this. Number one is understanding the human in front of us. We talk about human centered leadership. We have to look at the holistic approach [to] the human. If I can understand, what is their motivation? What brings them to the table? What is the [drive] for them to want to learn and want to do more?
The second thing I heard from you was being able to understand what are their strengths and what needs development. There are some things that people are never going to be good at. But there's a lot of things that people are really good at, and when we can leverage their strengths, we talk about strengths based approaches. You can see, okay, if I give them a little support here to develop step by step, what this looks like, and build them up over time. Then actually they can be a higher performer, which allows me to be a higher performer.
I heard that in what you said. And then, yes, it does take more time. I think the biggest myth that people buy into, especially in this hustle culture right now, is that we have no time. I don't have time to slow down and teach somebody. I don't have time, I'm just going to do it myself. But then the leader falls apart. That's the rupture. That's the breakdown.
Tell me a little bit about, how do you keep yourself well as a leader?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: It's a constant learning process for me, just because a lot of times you get these positions because you want to do more. You want to hustle. But it really has been, I think, life will [smack] you down. And I love [learning] that in many ways.
A lot of times what helps me is finding something outside of work that drives me. And that is a lot of different things for a lot of different people. Sometimes that's family. Sometimes that's faith. But there is something outside of your work that has to be [core to] your identity and give you the space to just be you as a person.
If you can come back to that, there [are] going to be hard days, but it really helps you reset sometimes and remember, this is not all that I am. This is part of it. This is very important to me and I love what I do. But being able to separate yourself from that thing sometimes, honestly, just helps you reset mentally, helps continue that passion, continue that drive. As opposed to just feeling like you're a cog in this machine that has to produce, produce, produce. Because eventually you do that long enough, you forget [why you] wanted to do it in the first place.
Lacy Dicharry: Really being able to reset. Rest is so important to performance, we know that. And you work with athletes.
Tell me a little bit about what the science says about rest. That's one of the last things on my list, and I will [put it off] until [I'm] forced to, because I love what I do and I have to take breaks. Rest is part of performance. Tell me, what is the science about this, and what do you want leaders to know about it?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: That's a great question. That's in part actually what set me down this [road] to begin with. My background in school was track, cross country. And running is one of those things that you feel like you can do every day, and if you do it the wrong way, it can very quickly lead to injuries. That's what led to a little bit of my fascination with sports medicine.
We know it's all about balance, and that does get lost in the hustle culture and in some of the mythology of these athletes who never take breaks. But you have to, because that's when we see a lot of these chronic issues, overuse injuries, ruptures, et cetera. Because the body does have limits, and unfortunately sometimes we don't think about that until after injury.
But the science has very clearly shown there's always a balance between capacity [and load]. If you exceed your capacity too often, too many times, et cetera, your tissue will not be able to handle it. And if we think about it from a physiological perspective, sometimes we're thinking about injury. But even from a mental health perspective, there's a limit, and all of our limits are highly individualized. That's what makes some of these questions hard to answer. But it's also important not to ignore the science.
In terms of your body, sometimes that's [aches]. That's a new pain, that's trouble getting out of bed. In terms of other things, sometimes it is just your mood. It's how you're responding to tasks. It's a little bit [of everything]. Sometimes we get these little check engine lights that tell us, and that's our body trying to tell us it is time for us to rest, before we get that bigger [problem] and need to go see the mechanic.
Lacy Dicharry: Right. The light is [glaring] at you, like a fully red car, and you're just like, I'm just going to keep going.
What percent of injuries are actually preventable, do you think?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: That is a great question. I've talked to a lot of industry leaders about this, and the funny thing is you can never prove injury prevention. Because if you do it right, nothing happened.
Now in terms of the actual science of it, there's some statistical things we can do. But I think in general, that North Star is, we are never going to prevent all injuries. If people are active, they're going to be getting hurt, just from a [sheer] volume perspective. And sometimes random things happen.
Our goal is to continue to reduce those rates as much as possible, knowing it's never going to be zero. That's not realistic. But there are also things that are very highly preventable, and the more we work towards that. We work towards a hypothetical zero, knowing, is it realistic? No. But you know, you reach for the stars, you land on the moon.
Lacy Dicharry: Yeah. In MMA, for example, a lot of what we did was to prevent injury, because that is one of the [roughest] sports on your body. I mean, it is a full body sprint, like, the entire practice. Especially the kickboxing pieces, you are using every single fiber, every joint, every muscle. Some of the things that we would do, obviously, warming up, stretching, [and] rapid [movements].
Even with that, I'm still having some stuff. But there is so much we can do in advance to prevent a lot of that, like you said.
As leaders of companies, leaders of teams across Louisiana, what are a couple of the things that you think they could actually do to ensure that they're doing that baseline level prevention for their team members and themselves?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: I think one, using that body analogy I gave: [what are] our check engine lights? If you have any type of performance metrics, you're probably looking at those. And maybe they're not necessarily bad, but how are they trending?
But also just little things, like as you interact with your team: are you noticing changes in those interactions? People who have left, have you done exit interviews? Have you asked for candid thoughts? Even if people are still there, are you asking for feedback? Because you said something that was great, that the myth of communication is that it happens.
I teach college classes sometimes and I say things and I see people [staring] back at me. In order to actually figure out that they've learned, yes, you do cases, you do tests. But also sometimes I just do activities. So what's a way you can engage with members of your team to figure out, are they understanding their tasks? Are they comfortable doing their tasks? Do they feel like a valued member of the team? And honestly, so much of that is really just, do people feel valued?
They can be doing an amazing job. Do they know that? They could be improving in an aspect. Do they know that? So how are you communicating in a way that goes both ways? They're getting what they need from you, you're getting what you need from them. And you have to be open to it, and you have to be open to adapting things that may not be working. Because it's a constant battle. What works one year, [you] might have to change.
Lacy Dicharry: The skill set I heard the most there is listening. Listening is prevention. Asking the question and truly listening. Now, whether you can change something or not kind of depends on your circle of control, your level of influence. But every leader can change something. It might have to be the top person at the company [to] really change [policy].
Are you making sure that we are taking our lunch breaks so they can go and get a reset? Are they getting outside at any point of the day? Are they able to get up and walk in between tasks? They seem like minor things, but they make a huge difference in people's wellbeing, their [brain] flow, their cognitive performance, their ability to show up, and state regulation, emotional regulation throughout the day. Those are things every leader can do.
For my top level CEOs or business owners out there, some things to consider are more policy based. Do we have policies that support mental health time off? Can we take a mental health sick day? Because mental health is health. Brain health is health. Can we include mental health days in some of what we offer as benefit packages?
Also, like, fun little apps that we can do, meditation, mindfulness apps. There are some of those that we can offer to employees and teach them how to do it. Back to that one time training: it's not enough to give them one piece of information. We have to consistently put it into practice for it to matter.
What are the actual daily things that you do to keep yourself well as a leader? Harvard calls it leader fitness. We've gone from resilience, because we don't want to just be responding all the time to something that happens. We want to actually have a high level of leader fitness, so that we can maintain ourselves and sustain ourselves through the longer term.
What are some of the consistent things you do on a daily basis, maybe at the workplace, or that you've built in at the beginning of the day?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: Great question. It feels like there have been ebbs and flows based on different years. Right now, what I like to do, on a good day, actually every day that [I get up] is a really good day. But most days, if it's not a torrential downpour or a thunderstorm, I'll try to get in a walk at work, even if it's just ten minutes. It allows me outside. If it's raining, [I'll do] an indoor walk, just to get some fresh air, a change of scenery. Get up from my office.
Sometimes that walk is just to various people's offices just to say hi. It doesn't have to be long. At home, I like to run, I like to exercise. That feels good for me, helps me.
And one thing that I've learned that's really helpful for myself is to give myself rules. At one point, my rule at home was, my laptop closes at, I think it was seven o'clock at [night]. And it didn't mean it was closed for the night. But the rule at the time was, I needed to close it for at least an hour starting at seven every night.
And the more I did that, the more I started to understand, okay, what are the tasks that I absolutely have to get done today? What are the tasks I can do tomorrow? What are the tasks the next week? As I've done this more, given myself more rules, I've kind of learned what works for me.
I don't really have that 7 PM laptop rule right now, because my life is shifting, and actually it's pretty much that the laptop really doesn't open at home. If it does, it's because it's a fully work from home day. But I've been really good at compartmentalizing in different ways, and that's really just been experience for me.
Lacy Dicharry: That's a really common thing. I was doing a coaching session this week, even with an executive at a really well known company here in Louisiana, literally the same conversation. They would force themselves to put their laptop in the truck, not bring it in the house.
I think the hardest part is not knowing what to do. It's giving yourself permission to do it on a regular basis. I feel like that pressure is to keep performing and to never stop. And I think COVID kind of really [amplified] that, that you actually don't ever stop. So that permission to give ourselves that boundary, to stop and to go and do the thing that we know is good for us, is maybe the hardest thing to do.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: I think a lot of that is looking backward. What helped me was, I thought of times that I had worked until 2 AM. I thought of times where I went over backwards to get a task done on an arbitrary timeline that I may have made for myself. And I think about it, and it actually affected the next six months.
The more I did that, the more I realized I wasn't appropriately valuing things. Everything couldn't be the most important thing at the same time. There are times where things are going to take priority and shift, but the more you can objectively take a step back, for yourself, for your entire team, the better off you're going to be.
Lacy Dicharry: Yeah, absolutely. You can't pour from an empty cup. And so you really have to be mindful about how [I put] my power into [it], and modeling that for my team as well. If I'm sending out 2 AM emails all the time, then my team is going to feel like that's what is necessary. So I have to really be mindful about what I'm modeling for them as well. I'm a better leader when I take care of myself, and I know that.
And some of our worst ruptures with teams is when we're tired, we're run down. Just like our body, when we're not taking care of ourselves. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired is kind of what we talk about. But that's when the worst leadership moments happen, when we are so run down that we don't have it in us to show up as our best self.
Lacy Dicharry: I want to ask you a little bit. We were talking earlier, you are two years into your research career, which is very exciting. You're a full time professor. What have you learned about leading in a university that you wish you would have known when you started?
Dr. Xavier Thompson: It's a great question. I think all of this is so much about the people. I always say, I can teach the hard skills. It's so hard to teach the soft skills. So much of what I do, so much of what all of us do on a daily basis, is really just about the people. And not just the people on my team.
It is the custodian [I see] on a walk. It is the person who works at the front desk here. It's honestly the random parent I might interact with who's lost walking through campus on a given day. And the more that you accept, like, we are all just people trying to make our way through this. Honestly, I think it [gives] a layer of relief.
In terms of the team concept, I look at my students and I look at my peers the same way. I don't know what you bring to the table. I have to get some of it. You may tell me some, you may not. And so there are times where I have to make decisions that are better for you. Or, hey, maybe we need to take [something] off your plate. Or maybe I need to ask you how you're doing, because you won't tell me unless I ask. And so learning how to read people is definitely something that has been a [big] part of my growth for a long time.
But every time you step up to a new level of authority. Now my students look at me differently than they would if I wasn't their professor. And so I had to recognize that. Sometimes, okay, I have to empower maybe a graduate student to talk to students on my behalf, because they feel a little less, I'm [threatening]. But they feel more comfortable with someone who they still perceive as a student. So just understanding your dynamics. But it's all about how [we relate] to each other.
Lacy Dicharry: I'm hearing some of that common humanity in there. And what was powerful about what you said is, the common humanity actually gives me relief as a leader, to know that I don't have to have all of these answers and be this top down shiny thing. But being in connection with anybody that comes across your day really is what helps you to truly sustain yourself and bring in that prevention, and to be able to stay well and stay a good leader.
Well, thank you so much for coming and talking to us. Really appreciate you being here, and learning from your research and how that can really impact leaders. I think some people might be surprised about what does ACL research have to do with leadership. Turns out, a lot. Thank you so much for coming.
Dr. Xavier Thompson: Thank you for having me. Good to be here.
Lacy Dicharry: [close] Thank you, everybody out there, for listening. We are very excited about this podcast, to be able to share some lessons in leadership. One of the most important things that we think about is access to leadership, and the goal of this podcast is to help increase that access to anybody that wants to get some leadership lessons and be able to implement some of these things that we're learning from our amazing team members at LSU.
To learn more about the Leadership Development Institute, and how we support leaders in organizations through coaching and facilitation, please visit us at [lsu.edu]/ldi and connect with us at @LSU_LDI on Instagram. Now, geaux lead.