Unlocking Gold Medal Performance

Last week I sat down with Steve Trapmore, the head coach of the current men’s rowing eight crew going for gold in the upcoming Paris Olympic games. What struck me is that despite becoming World champions last year, Steve is instilling a relentless focus on improving. He knows that what got them there won’t get them the gold they want in Paris. With the competition breathing down their necks, Steve knows that they have to continue to change to win.

My point here is that to achieve consistent gold medal level performance you always need to be adapting, experimenting and ultimately learning to get ahead of the competition. When our crew took gold in Sydney, we weren’t the physically strongest crew, nor were we the most technically gifted but I still say with confidence that we were the fastest learning crew and that was our differentiator.

Below, I’ve assembled three key ingredients that took us to our gold. I recently had the privilege of sharing these with approx. 130 senior leaders on a webinar to translate my story into a business context and in what they are trying to achieve. My key takeaway from conversations on the day was that the simple discipline of reviewing evidence of success can be a powerful tool to keep continually improving your performance. Regardless of if you’ve been in the leadership game 30+ years – if you don’t keep evolving – the competition will overtake you. What follows here are three critical ingredients for you and your team to unlock gold medal performance and get ahead of the curve:

1) Getting clear on your direction

2) Getting curious on your performance recipe

3) Building momentum together

1) What is your gold medal? Getting clarity of direction

In sport, you might think that everyone is trying to achieve the same thing. In the run up to the Sydney games, we had different views of what success looked like. One of our crew just wanted to represent Great Britain at a games. For our boatman, he just wanted to be a part of something that he could tell his grandkids about. For me, well… I wanted to win! In teams you can have different motivators and expectations about what you’re there to achieve. I see a similar pattern showing up in business. In senior leadership teams I often see functional and personal interests being placed above the collective. They quite often cause disagreements at the top and can easily rub against each other. This begs the question that if the team at the top isn’t clear, then how do they expect those further down an organisation to have a clear understanding of their priorities? It can actively translate to teams only doing what’s in front of them, rather than what will drive collective boatspeed. 

Agreeing clarity on what success means from the outset helps align those interests to a shared common goal. As a crew of nine and wider support team of 70 of us in total, we established in 1998 that we wanted to be an Olympic gold medal winning team. Layering this goal out as I share in the above video snippet enabled us to have conversations that were rooted in finding common ground that ultimately enabled boatspeed. It took the altitude of conversation away from personal interest to that of our collective goal. Getting that clear line of sight was crucial in testing every decision, conversation and action against the question ‘Will it make the boat go faster?’.

A lot of our client’s success stories relate back to having a clear and compelling strategic gold-medal goal that everyone has a line of sight 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?
  • Has it got clear, agreed on measures of what success looks like?
  • Has it got a clear plan of action that sits behind it?
  • Would your leadership team be able to communicate it clearly to their teams?
  • What would employee #136 say it is?

2) Getting curious on your performance recipe

Like many of the teams amping up their training for Paris this summer, in order to make sure we were all adding boatspeed we needed a performance mindset. We used to have specific sessions where we would get curious about our performance recipe. By that I mean we would consistently and regularly review whether what we were doing was driving the biggest impact against our goals. In sport, business and in any team context we only have a limited amount of time, energy and brainpower which makes it all the more important that we spend it in the right places. As such we analysed everything we did as a team, down to our decision-making, how we give feedback to each other, to how our oars hit the water – to look for efficiency gains everywhere we could. Everything we did had to take us closer to that goal. If it didn’t, we didn’t do it.

How can you encourage your team to get curious about their performance recipe? Try using our questions below 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?

3) Building momentum together

When we ran this webinar session last week, we helped the approx. 130 senior leaders spend time plotting out small wins they had in their businesses over the last few weeks and the performance ingredients that underpin their success. It was a reminder to me that having the discipline to set aside time to take a step back and reflect on the small signs that we’re making progress, can have a big impact on building our belief for the future.

As a rowing crew doing this activity allowed us to build a long list of data as evidence that we were improving. We arrived at the final with confidence, grounded in knowing our recipe was as strong as it could be. As a business, we now use this in our Will It? team to regularly keep celebrating the small wins and keep improving our recipe as we make progress as a team towards our goals. Try using an Evidence Wall with your team to regularly call out small milestones along the way.

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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