We always tell people we deliver impact and not days… well, here’s a nice testimonial about some of the relevant impact we’ve delivered. Thanks, Simon and thanks Cranfield University Key Account Management Best Practice Club.
Roger Federer is world class at managing his performance diary throughout a year, understanding the mental and physical demands on him, and preparing and performing accordingly. At 30, the oldest ever winner of the end of season masters tournament, arguably playing the best tennis of his life, looking and staying fresh, talking about how ready and excited he is for next year.
The consistency of his performances throughout his career is staggering and there is lots to be learned from him about knowing the demands upon you, knowing what you can do, and doing what you can do, and at being world class at rest & recovery including when to ease up and when and how you need to be at your peak.
Awesome.
“Talent is not enough” is one of things we regularly say at K2. What we mean is that your talent will only get you so far, but unless you recognise that talent is only a starting point, and that talent alone will only get you so far, then you will never achieve your full potential. As John Wooden, legendary basketball coach once said: “Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.”
Matthew Syed’s recently published book Bounce, makes this point expertly and precisely. Syed is convinced that it’s not talent that enables people to succeed but rather purposeful practice and a desire to improve. Syed’s book is a great read and thoroughly recommended. So to get better, work hard, seek feedback, stretch yourself, have a great attitude towards mistakes and failure, utilise an expert coach and adopt a mindset of growth.
We’ve been coaching a new client in Tokyo this week, and have been delighted to confirm to ourselves that the high performance principles we seem time and again in different environment, situations and cultures clearly resonate in Japan too. We’re always eager to learn from our clients as well and one story, which we’ve heard before, was told by one of the team here. The story centres around a frog, which if put into boiling water will jump out. However if put in room temperature and the water slowly heated, the frog will adapt to the temperature so successfully to start with, that eventually it will get cooked, boil and die. It’s a story that has meaning for the incredibly industrious Japanese who, we’re told, are the only country in the world to have a specific word for “working yourself to death”. Ouch.
So the learning question is, how good are you at adjusting to your environment and how good are you at managing your environment?
Rugby fans will know what a great performance the Welsh side produced in narrowly losing their World Cup semi-final against the odds on Saturday versus France. Great players they all are but also pretty united as a team. This article last week in the Telegraph describes the Welsh team’s weekly singing practice together, an idea that came from Warren Gatland, their coach who “wanted us to conform to custom in his home country and have an answer to the traditional Maori welcome. We are trying to be proud of our national culture.”
We love this example of finding ways to be united together, though social unity is only part, an arguably the lesser part, of a successful team, with unity around purpose and task being equally if not more important. So getting on well as a team together can be performance enhancing but being really clear why you exist as a team, what your goals are, what your roles are, and holding each other mutually accountable, is an even greater differentiator.
Having watched both of the rugby world cup quarter finals earlier today, between Wales & Ireland and then England & France (my wife’s away for the weekend) I was struck by how close all four teams are in terms of personnel, talent, ability, fitness etc and wondered what made the difference so that Wales and France triumphed. There are clearly many factors, and the margins were tight, though France were well on top of England for most of the game, but confidence and particularly the confidence that comes from momentum, was a factor I’m sure. The Welsh seemed to take confidence from earlier victories, and the French from taking the lead and building momentum in the first half.
Given how competitive business can be, how aware are you of psychological momentum and the effect it can have on confidence? Are you able to spot the results, events and moments that you can use to your advantage to build momentum for yourself and those around you, and derive the maximum future advantage from what is happening now or has happened in the past?
Here’s some extracts from a recent interview with Bradley Wiggins. There’s some interesting insights into the mindset of a great performer. Have a read.
“At this stage I seem to be getting better all the time and I’m not conscious of time running out. I want to keep progressing on the gains I’ve made.
I’m very close at the moment and I’m coming into my prime as an athlete.
In two years’ time I might have had enough of it and walk away. If I win the Tour next year I certainly will not want to go back and win it again.”
Wiggins revealed he has “never really put the work in before”.
“It’s taken a long time to get the maturity as an athlete to realise what it takes to compete at this level.
In the past I’ve done a lot on pure talent and short periods of hard work.
In the last few years the Tour has opened things up for me as to what the human body is capable of and how good you can be.
This time last year I would never have imagined having the season I’ve had by constantly evolving and constantly making gains. It’s not an age thing, these are the prime years. It’s more the mental thing - how long can you sustain that high level of concentration and intensity of training that goes with it?“
Which of these might make the biggest difference to your quest for increased consistency at the highest levels?
What a stunning performance from Team GB Cycling yesterday at the World Championships in the mens road race. The entire team effort (3 years in the planning) was executed with a superb collective commitment to a plan and some individual brilliance by all of the team members to ensure the best chances of success were achieved.
If you get chance, watch the last 15km of the race and you’ll get a complete feel for this consummate team effort. Mark Cavendish may have held his nerve to deliver a superb sprint finish to capture the title of World Champion, but every other member of the eight man team played their part and Mark Cavendish was very eager to stress this after the race. The foundations of success were there for all to see; total role clarity and role commitment, shared passion for achieving the collective goal, superb trust in self and others, and a real sense that success could only come from being a true team.
Have a look at those ingredients and see how well the teams that you are part of are performing. Which of the ingredients are you storming ahead on? Which ingredients are you taking for granted and which ingredients are being missed altogether? When you see them all working superbly together, as they did yesterday, then you really appreciate how important they all are and that elite performance should never be taken for granted!
We know that elite level athletes, unlike their corporate counterparts, often spend more time training than performing (though training is part of their performance). Similarly they can compete on learning, through performance reviews (corporate meetings tend to focus on operational issues, sometimes exclusively, rather than improvement) where the focus is on getting better, with feedback given and received with the intention of improving performance and criticism not taken personally. Here’s England rugby player Steve Thompson, after England’s first two games at the rugby world cup:
“Sometimes you’ve got to have a little bit of an argument. It’s like a relationship. Sometimes you get a little bit stale, don’t you? Sometimes everyone needs to give each other a little pat on the back or a little boot up the backside and that’s what’s happening. It’s perfect for us. Some reviews are nice and easy, some are harder and some are a bit more brutal. The harder meetings are just because we’ve got such high standards and we’ve got to get up to the standards again. Honesty is the best policy, as they say, ’stab you in the belly rather than in the back’, that’s what we need. In 2003, we had exactly the same thing after the Samoa game when we came close to losing. We had to move on. Sometimes if you are winning ugly and being harsh on yourself, it’s a good place to be.”
How good are you and your team at giving, and receiving, performance focused feedback to one another? Do you need to go through a team leader or manager, or are the relationships strong and trusted enough to make that loop unnecessary.
OUR LATEST THOUGHT PIECE
Well I guess it depends on the question you’re asking. And let’s make something clear - we know and believe that engagement is a key component for high performance. As well as being a good thing, that’s also the problem. It’s a component, not the whole thing.
Engagement does something simple - it encourages discretionary effort and that can only be good - without it, at best you’ll get compliance and that’s never going to help you outperform the competition. History is littered with stories of how engaged citizens, with something to fight for, have defeated well-paid mercenaries.
It also speaks to one of the main drivers of human motivation - the desire to be connected to - or engaged with - some higher purpose and so it does that too. So what’s the problem? Well there are (at least) three.
Firstly, engagement, contrary to what lots of organisations seem to believe, is not a project or something you “do” to other people. You don’t engage people, you create an environment where people have every opportunity to connect with you, your business, its soul and its purpose. It’s a behaviour, not a process or a project.
Secondly, from what we see, you’d be forgiven for thinking that engagement is a well understood and tightly defined process that any company can follow and get the result. It’s as if we’ve learned to believe that it’s a bit like employment law. You do this, you say that, you follow that process and hey presto - everyone’s engaged!
Those language geeks amongst you will have also spotted that there’s a deletion that’s taken place when we talk about engagement - engagement to or with what? Engagement doesn’t exist in isolation - so leaders who think they can buy an off the shelf engagement toolkit without doing the hard yards of knowing what their culture is (or should be) and as a result being able to answer the question “what do we want our people to feel engaged with? are going to a) spend a fortune and b) be left wondering why it hasn’t had the impact they expected. Though the managers who led the project will probably have moved on by then and can feel happy that they’ve ticked the “Have you done engagement?” box, so that’s OK.
Thirdly, there’s a whole lot of stuff that we know is vital for high performance that engagement doesn’t really touch or does so only tangentially - the other vital components. Here’s just a few:
• You can know what’s expected of you and have your progress discussed (classic engagement) yet the goals may not harness motivation and discussing progress is very different from knowing what you are going to start, stop and continue doing as a result
• Having strengths recognised and getting praise is a good start (engagement) though it doesn’t really touch strengths exploitation and a culture that encourages performers to crave performance feedback whatever form it takes (high performance). Of course having strengths recognised is useful (engagement) though the real difference comes from when strengths are exploited in a planned, proactive and positive way (high performance)
• Knowing your opinions count, having a best friend at work and having opportunities to grow and learn (engagement) will make somewhere nice to work but fail to address in enough detail key areas powerful for performance as having opportunities to develop mental strength, physical vitality and focused development that directly relates to the relevance and purpose of the role.
Finally, you could get great results in engagement surveys and have no detailed plan to deliver strategy, no skilled coaches, no collective role clarity, no embracing of change and no clear competition and preparation schedules.
In summary, lots of engagement approaches seem to ensure a place is not unpleasant to work. That’s a good starting point but not enough to help ensure high performance. For that, you need to do more than be a great place to work. Though if you’re after an MBA in lazy leadership, it might do the trick.