Talking Points on High Performance Leadership
Earlier on this week I delivered a keynote on High Performance Leadership to Managing Partners of Professional Services Firms. The premise: using research and case studies from high performance sport to demonstrate some core leadership principles and concepts.
High performance sport offers some brilliant examples of these core leadership concepts and principles being put into practice. And the examples offer a raft of practical tips, tools and ideas.
The Panel discussion afterwards generated some very strong debate and thoughts on some of the key areas covered. I was joined by Paul Kelly, Global Head of Cybersecurity Business Risk Assessment at HSBC, who brought insight not just from his Banking career, but also his military career.
In this blog I share some of the areas that caused high quality discussion, under the three topics: Leading Culture; Leading Self; and Leading People.
Leading Culture
“A winning culture costs you nothing, but getting it wrong is the most expensive mistake in business.” (Sir Clive Woodward, Manager of England Men’s Rugby 2003 World Cup winning squad).
Values: the discussion centred around the challenges of articulating Values to which your staff could actually bring meaning, as well as the power of Values to drive a feeling of unity and ‘team’ (using Team GB at the London Olympics as an example). We looked at how, in order for Values to really mean anything, and have impact, they should be driving every decision, action or behaviour on the ground. And how I should be able to enter a lift in the offices of anyone in the room, and get a good response from my lift-mates to the following questions: “What are the Core Values of your Firm, and can you give me an example of having put them into practice?”
Behaviours: As Sir Dave Brailsford has famously said, to change culture it’s no good just writing your Values down on a piece of paper, you have to alter the way people actually behave.
“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”
We talked through the success of Team Sky’s Winning Behaviours App in the lead up to their first Tour de France win in 2015, and how instrumental this had been in the turnaround of the Team’s fortunes from the chastening 2014 Tour.
Standards of Behaviour is a hot topic in many professional services firms at the moment. This led to a discussion around legendary coach and leader Bill Walsh’s approach - get the Standards of Performance right, and the results will take care of themselves. Immortalised in his book The Score Takes Care of Itself, this prompted reflections on focusing on source, rather than symptom. One particularly interesting question on this subject was around dealing with the talented but badly behaved, those who produce the goods but do not live by the Firm’s Values. In response I talked about the famous All Blacks ‘no dickheads’ policy, but Paul and I also stressed the importance of working hard to leverage talent whilst supporting them to understand and live the Values.
Leading Self
“Feedback is the breakfast of Champions” (Ken Blanchard, Leadership author and expert)
One of the areas we examined under Leading Self was the relentless desire to improve, and related humility, exhibited by many elite athletes and coaches. This led to an interesting discussion around feedback. Seeking feedback is such an important driver for development and improvement, but the more senior you are, the more difficult it can be to actually obtain genuine feedback.
Paul referred the audience to the work of Brene Brown (Dare to Lead and her related TED talk on vulnerability watch here.) As leader you don’t need to have all the answers. In fact there are a whole bunch of reasons why this should not be the case. And by showing vulnerability you help build empathy and trust. So in terms of gaining valid feedback (as opposed to tick box feedback where your direct reports want to avoid upsetting you) model vulnerability, model humility, and provide as many opportunities as you can to seek help and feedback. When you introduce ideas, suggestions etc, how about starting with: “This is where I have got to….who can help me improve this? Or who can help me understand what I am missing?” This doesn’t need to reduce your credibility, or your authority. It’s just modelling the sort of openness, humility and desire to improve that you will want your people to exhibit. And if you want an example from business of someone who has done this brilliantly, then just read Satya Nadella’s book Hit Refresh (he is the CEO at Microsoft).
”Only by knowing yourself can you become an effective leader” (Vince Lombardi, Green Bay Packers Coach)
We also touched on the importance of self-awareness to drive your performance as leader. Both in terms of understanding and leveraging your strengths, but also in terms of understanding where best to focus your development efforts. Many leaders will have done countless personality profiles, but have you actually built on the information gained? Have you actively leveraged your strengths? Have you focused on just one or two key development areas? Have you taken on some coaching to help you improve?
Leading People
What should a Purpose Statement achieve? To examine this, we looked at the huge amount of time and effort the GB Women’s hockey squad had put into articulating something that had real meaning for them, as opposed to the simple ‘win gold’. How an organisation then defines what success looks like caused interest in the room, with the FA’s ‘being in the closing stages of every major tournament we enter’ prompting quite a bit of nodding and thinking. I wonder, do you know what success looks like for your organisation?
“People will rise to the challenge if it’s their challenge” (Wayne Smith, All Black player and coach)
We also examined the importance of delegating ownership and control to your people. Discussion centred around an important bi-product (the ability to observe) and how you can ensure that any such delegation is effective. Along with focusing on getting the right people on the bus, and importantly, in the right seats, we discussed the need to:
ensure the correct systems and processes in place to facilitate this;
ensure the environment and culture supports this; and
the vital importance of ensuring that your people have the capability to thrive on increased ownership and control. This was where the GB Women’s hockey squad provided a brilliant case study, with their introduction of ‘Thinking Thursdays’, designed to build the squad’s ability to cope with, and thrive on, increased ownership and control.
I am always grateful for engaged and thoughtful audiences, and it was a real pleasure to be involved in this event. In this session I covered a whole range of sports, case studies and research, and that breadth was really effective in informing and inspiring the audience.
For more on this or any aspect of leadership, with a healthy dose of mindset, sport, and I hope usefulness thrown in, do feel free to browse through all the articles in the Huddle, or get in touch with me directly on catherine@sportandbeyond.co.uk