We recently hosted over 80 senior leaders from around the UK to our annual conference. We hugely enjoyed welcoming, challenging and supporting delegates to get clarity on their direction and everyone pulling together to achieve it. We use these in all our client work, internally every day and share them here to help translate our Olympic-winning principles into your business success.
Reflecting on the event day, our Senior Performance Consultant Natalie Macaluso and Head of Marketing Josh Trebilcock share their top takeaways that felt particularly pertinent to those attending.
We structured the day around our performance principles into 3 key areas:
- What is your gold medal? How to get clarity on your direction.
- Focusing on performance in order to achieve results.
- Changing team performance: Working together effectively to make it happen.
1) WHAT IS YOUR GOLD MEDAL? HOW TO GET CLARITY ON YOUR DIRECTION
So how can you get clear on what you’re trying to achieve? Watch Ben share in the video below how the crew got clear on what they were trying to achieve by breaking down their goal into layers.
Try using our tried and tested Layered Goals framework that Ben talks through in the above video. This helped Ben and the crew focus their efforts on what was most important to get their gold medal. Brian P. Moran once said “A vision without a plan is a pipe dream.”. By layering our goals, we can break down an overarching goal into measurable, tangible targets. These are backed up by actionable areas of focus and brought to life through a plan of everyday actions. By layering our goal it brings clarity to others and lets them understand the role they play in achieving it. It makes the goal a planned reality. Crucially, this allows us to focus our attention only on what will add boatspeed.
Do you have directional clarity in your organisation?
A lot of our client’s success stories relate back to having a clear and compelling strategic gold-medal goal that everyone can connect to. A good way of stress-testing whether you have this for you and your organisation is to begin by asking yourself these questions:
- What is your company or department’s goal?
- How will you know you’ve achieved it? Has it got a clear plan that sits behind it?
- What would your Leadership Team say it is?
- What would employee #136 say it is?
Without the above, you are more likely to drift into siloed ways of working, pulling in different directions. With a lack of alignment at the top, you run the risk of engagement dropping off further down the organisation as they can’t see a clear direction of travel. Where do you need to focus your attention in the coming months?
2) FOCUSING ON PERFORMANCE IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE RESULTS
Once you have that directional clarity, it makes it easier to focus your energy, decision-making and actions on what will take you there. In short, you can start to challenge everything around the famous question, ‘will it make the boat go faster?’ in service of that goal.
Professional athletes always want to improve and typically spend hours reviewing videos of their previous performances. They analyse what went well, what didn’t and look for aspects of their performance that they can improve upon. The best athletes don’t dwell on the result for too long. Instead, they zero in on their performance as that’s what holds the key to how they can get better the next time. Ben’s crew got into the habit of ruthlessly reviewing their performance right down to the level of detail of hand positioning and speed of connection in the water. Everything they did was focussed on improving their performance in service of boatspeed as it gave them the best chance of gold.
How can you encourage your team to get curious about their performance recipe? Try using our above analogy so they can judge for themselves – what ingredients are working in their performance? What’s not? What ways of working are taking them closer to the goal? What might be holding them back? Does what they routinely do day-to-day set them up for success? If not, what needs to change? Try using our below performance questions in team meetings and 1:1s to review with your team:
3) CHANGING TEAM PERFORMANCE: WORKING TOGETHER EFFECTIVELY TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
You’ve got to work on the team as much as you do the outcome.
Are your team bought-in to what you’re trying to achieve? Are they working as effectively as they could be? How could you be working better together as a team?
Our 3Ms (Mutual Desire, Mutual Reliance and Measurability) form the foundational elements of what it takes to be a high performing team. In this section we’re going to particularly home in on the specific ‘Mutual Desire’ aspect from Natalie’s below video and how you can shape this for you and your team.
It’s all very well having a clear gold medal goal, but unless people buy into it, it doesn’t mean anything. You’ve got to create time and space for people to understand at a logical level what the goal means for them and for them to get motivated and fired up at an emotional level.
We help teams build both aspects by taking them through the below 2-step process:
- What floats your boat? – Understand your top personal drivers as an individual.
- What’s in it for me? – Understand how these values map to what you’re trying to achieve.
So that…
- Everyone can see the role they play in your company’s goal and build personal motivation towards it.
- You can help your team to do the same.
What Floats your boat? – Understand your top personal drivers as an individual
It’s helpful to spend time thinking about what motivates you at a personal level. We encourage leaders and their teams to think about their non-negotiable, fundamental values as a person.
What’s in it for me? – Understand how these values map to what you’re trying to achieve
Having identified their key fundamental values in the ‘what floats your boat?’ exercise, we help leaders and teams to map out how it will fulfil them if they achieve their gold. Every individual team member would be given a framework to define and specifically articulate what they will get as a result of achieving this goal.
It’s worth noting here that each person will have their own definition of what their values are. That’s important. The point is that they are able to link their values (however they may define them and what that means to them) to the goal. By doing so, they can start to build excitement as to why achieving the goal will fulfil them. This is the stuff that gets people out of bed in the morning. By doing so, people understand how their personal motivators map to your gold and have a process to build that alignment and excitement for themselves.
So what are the key takeaways for you and your organisation? We’ve touched on a range of aspects in the below to get you thinking. But what does it mean in the context of what you’re trying to achieve? Try using the above guidance to work out where your team could most benefit, whether; clarity on direction, a focus on performance or how effectively you work together to make it happen.
Do get in touch if we can help support you in this process – we would love to have a no-strings attached conversation to help you and your team achieve your gold.
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