Coaching the business world to think, prepare and perform like elite athletes

This is an old newsletter, but we thought it worth opening up to our blog audience. The film in question being on the tv over the weekend probably prompted remembering this! What do you think?

From 2008…

During the Olympics in Beijing, apart from watching first hand some outstanding teamwork in action at Shunyi Rowing Lake, I was also watching a few films with my roommate to pass the time. There was an interesting team theme that emerged from the films, some more useful than others. “Team America”, for those who know it, probably didn’t contain too many elements within it that I could use within this newsletter - highly amusing, but not the stuff of high performance team psychology! However, the Zack Snyder film “300″ probably had more useful team messages within it for those times when the odds seem stacked against you and all you have is the team around you (and a couple of million Perisans of most unimaginable shape and form!). Using the film as a stimulus for this newsletter led me down some really simple pathways to some concepts that seem well worth passing on as the performance environment shifts inexorably in a more negative direction!
300 is not my normal kind of film to be honest, but it was a useful reinforcement of the elite team principles that we promote and an extreme way of demonstrating the power of a collective mindset, a complete commitment to shared values and undeniable mutual accountability. If you don’t know the film, it’s about the Battle of Thermopylae at which an alliance of Greek City States joined forces to hold back a vast Persian army for seven days. As WikiPedia tells us (so far as we can trust an open source database!); “The performance of the defenders at the battle of Thermopylae is also used as an example of the advantages of training, equipment, and good use of terrain as force multipliers and has become a symbol of courage against overwhelming odds.”That lot seems very pertinent right now!

Now, force multipliers isn’t an everyday term and is worth explaining to see how it stacks up for relevance in the current climate for teams who have slightly less threat of impending death, but perhaps equally important performances to deliver (although you’ll probably not end up as an entry in Wikipedia, unless of course you choose to take a self-publicity route!).

So, are you getting the benefit of force multipliers in your team? Well, force multipliers are simply things that allow you to be more effective than you might otherwise be - stuff that you can do that builds on your natural talent, rather than taking it for granted. From a military perspective, force multipliers to be exploited would typically be:

• Morale
• Technology
• Geographical Features
• Weather
• Training and Experience
• Feared Units
• Deception

It seems that from our eliteteam^® programme you could translate these into:

• Motivation (control, confidence and connectedness) and clarity of your Why What How Goals (by the way, have you updated them? Do they need to be any different given that the world around you has probably changed since we worked through these key goals with you?)
• How effectively you as a team use your equipment and collective intelligence
• Knowing the world you have to perform in and making sure you use your view of the world to your advantage
• Understanding the climate or the context that you’re currently performing in and making sure you’re 100% focused on the team’s performance in current conditions (rather than just acting like it’s a sunny day, when the sky is full of portent!)
• Training and Experience - preparation and sharing of past knowledge within the team
• Leading with standard bearers who are particularly adept or passionate about key team characteristics
• Mmm, Deception… now how does that work in your world? I guess we’d say get great at being yourselves as a team before you worry about gaining competitive advantage from pulling the wool over the eyes of the opposition or using smoke and mirror type tricks!

It’s interesting that in the military world, these force multipliers are known to make a consistent and significant difference in head to head battles. Certainly the sense of identity and commitment to a common cause is known to be a very strong force multiplier when you’re about to put your life on the line. Indeed in the 300, King Leonidis uses the shared identity and goal to clearly communicate to his soldiers and people,
“Children, gather round! No retreat, no surrender; that is Spartan law. And by Spartan law we will stand and fight… and die. A new age has begun. An age of freedom, and all will know, that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it!”

So, what is your team “law”, or performance mindset, and what are the goals to which this mindset is being applied right now? When the conditions are tough, morale and motivation have to be as robust as possible, so it’s worth investing heavily in this area right now.

When talking to the Persian King, Leonidis also observes, “You have many slaves, Xerxes, but few warriors. It won’t be long before they fear my spears more than your whips.” Which is completely in keeping with the military observation that a volunteer force will always outperform a conscript force. For us, that’s all about the power of intrinsic motivation and choosing to be somewhere as opposed to being compelled to be there. Helping your team find as much personal meaning and challenge in the current context will make an important difference to how far they’re willing to go for the team - there’s not many people on the extra mile, so make sure there’s a high percentage of your team on there and that they’re loving being there!

All of the eliteteam^® principles are force multipliers and given that the conditions are pretty challenging, it’s well worth making sure that you’re gaining full advantage from these right now. You might not have a marauding army of freaky Persians bearing down upon you baying for your blood, but the principles of collective human performance that came to me through the medium of film in a Beijing hotel room will certainly stack the odds in your favour for your own contemporary battles. Can you afford not to have these simple force multipliers of human performance at all below 100% right now?

We had the opportunity last year to speak to the Cranfield University Key Account Management Best Practice Club. It was a great day and a great chance to challenge the audience to think a lot about how the world of high performance sport and its approach to coaching could help the world of Key Account Management. Have a look at this video to get a flavour of the kinds of things we talked about…

It’s a great group to be part of and we’d highly recommend anyone serious about being high performers within Key Account Management to follow the link above and get in touch with Cranfield.

In the Wikipedia entry for Goal Setting (in business) you’ll see the following:

1. Goals focus attention towards goal-relevant activities and away from goal-irrelevant activities.
2. Goals serve as an energizer; higher goals induce greater effort while low goals induce lesser effort.
3. Goals affect persistence; constraints with regard to resources affect work pace.
4. Goals activate cognitive knowledge and strategies that help employees cope with the situation at hand.

Here’s an alternative view of how goals work in organisations, that have resulted in them having quite the opposite effect to the development of this tool in the first place:

1. Goals focus attention towards the fact that they’ve been set for you and have been set “wrongly” and that you wouldn’t have set that goal for yourself and that the goal has been imposed and that goal has to be hit at all costs.
2. Goals serve as a de-energiser because they’re set for you and you feel no ownership over them and you fear them being set because there is now a stick with which you will be beaten if you don’t hit that goal.
3. Goals affect persistence - as goals are set for people and done unto them, then there attitude towards them is usually one of helplessness, so this seldom promotes an obsessive drive to pool every resource to see if the goal can be reached.
4. Goals activate cognitive knowledge and strategies that help employees explain to themselves why the goals are impossible to achieve and that there has been very little taking into account of the reality of the current performance climate when setting these goals.

If you recognise any of the four points above, then come and have a chat with us about the origins of goal setting and how you can reclaim the power of goal setting by using the tool in the way that it was originally intended to be used.

Some twitter activity over the past few days from Ruby McGregor-Smith (@rubyms)at Mitie prompted us to look back at a couple of thought pieces from a few years ago. Even though the dates have changed, many of the sentiments still remain true for the here and now in terms of maximising performance and giving us all the best chance of turning the economy around. So, we thought we’d upload this thought piece to see if it could spark some interest from you all and perhaps provide some useful pointers. Thanks for reading and thanks for the inspiration Ruby!

Great interview on Test Match Special at the moment with Matt Prior, England cricket team’s wicket keeper, talking about what it’s like to be on tour, revealing some elements of what’s making England a great team at the moment:

• having a few rules, “nothing that you wouldn’t want to have anyway”
• awareness of how different individuals need to recharge their batteries - some reading on their own and some by socialising
• that there are different roles, for example who in the squad or support team acts in the role of confidant
• really valuing the role of the support team generally
• being a tight unit through understanding each others personalities

All things which would directly translate to a high performing team in any environment - and which happen when a team takes and invests time to be a team. You wouldn’t expect a premiership football to turn up for their first fixture on the first day of a season and expect to perform at their best with no practice - yet that’s what some corporate teams try and do.

What percentage of your team’s team time is spent discussing results and what percentage is spent reviewing and planning how you will perform?

Andy Murray’s epic semi-final today in the Australian open showed once again the fine margins between success and failure at that elite level of competition. With such fine margins it’s virtually impossible to pinpoint the exact difference between the players, whether it was mental, tactical, technical physical or something else (what’s for sure is that to win in the face of such tough competition you need each of those components as strong as possible). Murray’s immediate post match interview revealed some insights into the mindset of the elite performer, including the obsessive focus on inputs. Rather than obsessing on the result, the outcome ( not 100% in either player’s control), his comments were about what he can take from today’s game, the future, and what he needs to do next. Reflecting that he would do “not a whole lot differently” from today, he said that since the last time he played Djokovic he’s “mentally stronger” and has “closed the gap”. He said he “believed I could win throughout” and “fought well”. Looking forward he said that the game would “stand him in good stead” for the rest of the season” that he has taken “huge steps in the right direction” and needed to “keep working”.

See too the way England’s cricketers mentally approached the second test vs Pakistan having lost the first. Geoff Boycott commented today “I’ve not changed my view from the start of the match. England are going to win. They can’t bat as badly as they did in Dubai, they’re good players and they’re mentally stronger than Pakistan.”

Bringing 100% of what you can, and maintaining confidence after a disappointment, are consistent elite performer characteristics.

Ever heard “you’re only as good as your last goal/game/result”, as a way to encourage continued effort i.e. if my last result was a win, then if I want to keep up my success/reputation I need to win again, so I need to keep working hard and practicing and doing those things that helped me to win last time. Potentially quite a helpful phrase then.

However, if your last result was a defeat or just a poor performance, it’s unfortunately all too easy to let your last result disproportionately affect your confidence. If you’ve ever been full of confidence, but had one poor result/performance/game and suddenly your confidence becomes shaky, then maybe it’s your thinking that’s gone wrong, rather your talent, technical skills or your capability. This needn’t be the case! Solid confidence, acquired and built up over a period of time through hard work, past successes and belief in yourself by you or from others, can withstand a negative result or poor performance (a great example is given in Ben Hunt-Davies’ book Will It Make The Boat Go Faster. Ben’s tells the story of the GB men’s rowing eight winning gold at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. In their heat the crew came second to the Australians, which was not plan A. The guys knew they’d not delivered their best and were determined to put things right in their race off to get to the final, and then in the final itself. And they were able to think like that, rather than capitulate, partly because of the confidence that they’d built up over two previous seasons of increasingly successful rowing).

Everyone has past successes in their lives, caused wholly or partly by them, and these can’t be taken away, so are a great source of ongoing and lasting confidence. Don’t let your confidence be dependent on your last result.

K2 have very a proud relationship with the Dame Kelly Holmes Legacy Trust, a charitable body set up to provide life chances to young people who haven’t had the same good fortune or opportunities as so many of us. Dame Kelly Holmes is a double Olympic gold medal winner from the Athens Olympics in 2004, in the 800m and 1500m, and she’s an inspiration to many, including us. Together with Dame Kelly we’ve developed a Double Gold version of the our athlete@work programme. She’s done a lot more than put her name to it, helping us to develop new ideas, content and being very personally involved.

One of the things we’ve learned from Dame Kelly, who experienced many up and downs, setbacks and injuries on her way to success, is that finding out how good you can be, is not a pursuit of perfection but a pursuit of using 100% of what you have available. That is, using all your knowledge, skills, mental strength, energy, support and tools to perform at peak moments and in a consistent, sustainable way. i.e. how well you know your challenges, know yourself, what you need to do to and doing it.

If you like to know what’s going on in the world of psychology that’s very relevant to the world of work, then you should probably favourite the British Psychological Society Occupational Psychology Blog. There’s lots of interesting and relevant information here to stimulate your thinking about your work related mindset.

Staying relevant is always important in any high performance environment, but nowadays with the cost of failure ever higher and the desire to succeed constantly stronger, it’s important to find the easiest way to get every bit of useful information as early as possible.

Enjoy the read. It’s a great resource.