Team goals and the Tour de France

Could you put your team’s needs ahead of your own, and if so could you, do you, do that at work?

Riding the Tour de France needs all the usual ingredients of elite sporting success… meticulous preparation, focus, determination, physical stamina, mental toughness.

It also needs the unwaveringly clear mindset that the team comes first and the individual role is all, and only ever, about what’s best for the team.

Could you, can you, do you work in a team where the team goals are abundantly clear and consistent for everyone on the team? And where everyone focuses solely on their role in helping the team and each other to achieve the team’s purpose?

This isn’t easy when a lot of the organisation’s structures and procedures emphasise individual performance ahead of team performance.

Most results in most businesses are delivered through teams or team work, so it’s no great surprise that CEO’s want their teams to be high performance ones! Most CEOs want a high performing team because they know that a high performing team will outperform a group of high performing individuals. Yet few do anything about it.

In the Tour it’s the Team Manager’s role to make sure the team goals are clear, the team strategy is decided and the team and individuals are all clear what they have to do in their role. Without the hard work to create this team mindset you can end up with a team full of individuals and egos and they’ll usually get beaten by the better prepared UNIT .

So could you ride the Tour? Can you ride your equivalent race and put the needs of the team before your own?

Now that’s a high performance team mindset and in many existing organisations it takes some doing to move from the individual excellence approach to truly living the team ethos.