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?