Written by Ben Hunt-Davis, Olympic Gold Medallist and co-founder of performance consultancy Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?.
Winners and losers often have the same goal. Simply having a clear goal is not enough on its own. Every single crew in the final of our Sydney race wanted that gold. So, what set us apart? What made the difference in us clinching gold vs the Aussies or Italians?
In my opinion, there were two key fundamentals that made the difference from coming last to winning a Gold Medal at the Sydney Olympics (you’ve got to have both):
- Having a common goal
- Fostering the high-performance culture and behaviours that would get us there.
In 1998 we were a rubbish team, by 2000 we were a good team. You’ve got to work on the team as much as you’ve got to work on the outcome.
The importance of high performing teams has long been recognised as a driver of business performance. While in a notably different context, I see our clients still struggling with fundamentally similar team-rooted problems. Whether feelings of disconnect, distrust, siloes, egos, individual differences, transactional relationships or low engagement – these are all challenges that we’re hearing and seeing amongst our clients every day.
In order to thrive in this post-pandemic hybrid world, the need for teams to focus on how to work together effectively is greater than ever.
In the ‘Teams’ chapter of the book, I share the story of a falling out we had at our crew’s training camp near Lucern, Switzerland. Having just lost at Henley the week before, Lucerne Regatta awaited us as the last race before the Olympics. It served as one last opportunity as a team for us to iron out any kinks in our technique and make any final improvements. Covering up to 50 kilometres each day, we were on the water two to three times a day. My main memory from that camp was not only the physical but mental exhaustion too as we all worked relentlessly to listen to work with our coaches with a united focus on improving. It wasn’t easy. One incident in particular led to a big fallout between Harry the coach and the crew.


In our collective push some of us lost focus, or had gotten too slack on some of our Team Rules we’d produced together (more on this later!). One day our coach Harry got so p*ssed off, he gathered the crew to give us the bollocking of a lifetime. Questioning our commitment (rightly or wrongly), by the time he had finished half the group were really p*ssed off – some silently, some not so silently. It resulted in Harry storming out after falling out with a few of the crew, and it needed rectifying.
The next day we had a long conversation to repair things. We talked it through with the intention of getting to the bottom of it – we spoke about how what had happened had to make us faster. We decided to review why that had happened and use it in the remaining 69 days to the Olympic final as something that would help us learn and come together as a group. We used it to make us stronger as a unit.
Disagreements happen, particularly if the stakes are high. If you are chasing a stretching and challenging goal, it’s easy to forget that it will likely stretch and challenge you as a team! We knew that if we were going to win gold in the Sydney Olympics, we were all mutually reliant on each other to make it happen. Therefore, it was crucial we found a way to work together as effectively as possible.
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, our definition of a high performance culture is a universally agreed set of behaviours that leads to the consistent delivery of superior results. In the corporate world, it means a rich and fulfilling environment where employees are engaged, thriving and want to work.
We suggest that if you want to build a strong team:
- Have a common goal
- Agree how to behave around each other
(That’s it! No magic fairy dust!)
What’s consistent in winning teams is they have a clarity of purpose and are therefore able to focus on what’s important. There must be a compelling goal that energises and aligns team members. Inevitably the goal will mean different things to different team members but what’s important is that the team are motivated to achieve the goal and united behind a common purpose.
We became a gold-medal winning team by forming a common goal which had three features:
- Mutual desire
- Mutual reliance
- Measurability


In the below video, Senior Performance Consultant Natalie Macaluso outlines our 3Ms High Performing Teams model:
Mutual Desire
The gold medal meant different things to different people in the crew – money, proving other people wrong, being the ‘best’… one of the boatmen just wanted to be a part of something he could tell his grandkids about one day – but we all wanted it really really badly.
It’s important that leaders keep bringing clarity to and reiterating their direction. By doing so they can help teams who are siloed and disconnected to realign and trust that they’re all striving to achieve the same goal for the greater good. An important way of doing this is to develop an understanding of one another’s motivation to achieve the goal. Give people space and time to form their own understanding of the goal and why it will benefit them. By doing so, you can start to change the dynamic to move them away from a transactional way of working to one which both takes into account unique individual motivators and creates a shared focus on the task in hand.
It’s all too easy to assume that what motivates us will motivate other people. A simple way of figuring out what floats each person’s boat is to ask them. What excites each individual in your team? What constitutes a benefit or reward for them?
Mutual Reliance
For the goal to be achieved, it’s critical that everyone has clarity on their part in the goal’s achievement. High performing teams are clear on who is doing what and are held to account to deliver on those actions. Experience tells us that mutual accountability also often grows as a by-product of embedding a common team purpose – reinforcing a team’s bond with greater levels of trust across the group in their pursuit of the goal.
In order to get the best out of each other en route to our gold medal, we came up with a list of team behaviours among us that we knew led to our best performances in the past. These became our Team Rules – an actively agreed upon living and breathing list of do’s and don’ts – a team contract that we all signed up to. I share more on this in the video below:
Team Rules enabled us to hold each other to account. Is everyone doing what they said they would do? We had a clear goal already and understood what we had to focus on to get there so it then became about what behaviours we needed to encourage (or stop), to make our boat go faster.


You can see in the above our original cribsheet for the Olympic village. Now some of these you’ll see may show my age (e.g. taking mobile phones with us!) – but as I say in the above video, fundamentally, this was about what rules were going to help us succeed? For you and your team – what are the behaviours and ways of working that drive your best performance?
Measurability
Every goal needs clear measures of success. Clear performance goals will help both individuals and the team to keep track of its progress and hold itself to account. We know that those who set clear and measurable goals are 76% more likely to reach them than those who don’t (Harvard Business Review). We also know that the very act of writing them down makes them 42% more likely that we’ll achieve them (Domincan University, California).
Assessing progress, individually and collectively helps us stay focused and aligned, working as a collective to meet deadlines and build a sense of energy, motivation and engagement as you get close to achieving the goal. In turn, this fosters the conditions for innovation, productivity and bottom-line performance.
Using the famous Whitney Houston question – “How will I know?” – How will you know when you’ve ‘completed’ your goal? What are the finish line indicators? Breaking this down enables you to have a collective focus on the performance ‘levers’ that will add the most boatspeed to take you there as a team.
Try using out 3Ms model to keep you on track to your gold. For more guidance feel free to check out our article ‘How to achieve your gold’ here or get in touch to see how we can support you and your team.