What can cross-country skiers and Netflix teach us about empowering our people?

The Why

One of my most-used mantras when working with senior leaders is ‘involve people – if they help plan the battle, they won’t battle the plan.’ It comes from a short and brilliant leadership book called Piranhas in the Bidet.

Let’s take a quick look at what sits behind this.  Leadership is hard. It can certainly be relentless. One of the key skills to learn in order to make success in the role more sustainable is that of knowing not just what you should be doing, but also what you should not be doing. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, put it: “one of the things we sometimes confuse is all the things we should be doing versus all the things that only you can do.”

Understanding what your role actually is, how you should be deploying your time, what your priorities are, and what you should not be getting involved in, are all key to sustainable performance as a leader.

Making this work of course requires that you have good people around you, and that you are comfortable with delegating and devolving ownership to your people. And this isn’t just beneficial for your performance as a leader. It’s also beneficial for the performance of those who take on the work, and so the organisation as a whole. As noted in a Harvard Business Review article from last year, ‘Autonomy is a hallmark of an innovative culture. The ability to make decisions for yourself enhances motivation, which in turn contributes to higher levels of performance and well-being. It also gives leaders more time to focus on the most significant and complex decisions and explore new sources of value creation. Creating more autonomy involves shifting power from the top and center of the organization to the front line by empowering people to make decisions.’*

This is why leadership has been steadily moving since the beginning of this century from old-style ‘command and control’ to a new focus on ‘direction and clarity.’ However, as with any significant change, it isn’t always easy to put into practice. You’ve often got to shift inbuilt habits, and inbuilt beliefs, both from an individual and an organisational perspective. And you also have to make sure that your people, and your organisation, are set up correctly to cope with, and leverage, a new focus on ownership and empowerment.

This is where our Norwegian cross-country skiers, and an entrenched practice within Netflix, can help us. Taking the skiers first, this is a story that reminds us that it’s not just about devolving ownership – it’s also about those duly empowered being prepared to take responsibility. It’s a story that I first came across in Owen Slot’s book The Talent Lab: the secrets of sustaining and creating success.

The Skiers

The 2006 Winter Olympics were a disaster zone for Norway’s cross-country ski team. Used to finishing top of the cross country medal table, they came only seventh. Their response was to put together a crack team of physiologists, psychologists, historians, former athletes, and coaches, to try and get to the bottom of what had changed. The information and data that they discovered was distilled down into the ultimate success manual, a book called Den Norske Langrennsboka (the Norwegian Book of Cross-Country Skiing). And the result of all this work? A significant turnaround in the team’s fortunes; by 2015 the team won nine of the twelve golds in the cross-country events of the world championships in Falun.

You can appreciate that the contents of the manual were now pretty valuable intellectual property. In the spirit of cross-nation sharing and collaboration, the Norwegian experts entertained a small group of British Olympic coaches who had come to discover some of the secrets of their performance in this discipline. And one of the things they learnt was this: the nature of the cross-country training regime requires a lot of training, and a lot of long distances. This means that 80 per cent of the work has to be done solo, or away from the eyes of the coaches. Meaning that the cross-country coaches have to let their athletes go and just trust them. In the Norwegian system now every young athlete is required to record a training diary. Not only does this mean a significant database and feedback system for the national federation, it also means that the young athletes are encouraged to understand and interpret their own training data. As Slot says, because they effectively self-train, they are encouraged, as far as possible, to self-coach. And Slot goes on to say that there is evidence that one discriminatory factor between those who are and who are not successful in their ability to do this, is the extent to which they take ownership.

And this I think goes to the heart of the issue. We know that allowing a level of ownership in the workplace can drive motivation, and better outcomes. With this ownership though must come a willingness and desire to take the consequences. Ownership is both a privilege and responsibility. For the budding Norwegian skiers coming through the ranks, it’s not just those who are not prepared to take ownership of their training that you want to worry about. It’s also those who are happy to be given ownership, and control, and yet are not prepared to take responsibility for the outcomes. What you really want is those who relish the ownership, and also relish the responsibility. And are prepared to be accountable for the outcomes, rather than passing the buck back onto the coaching staff.

The Netflix practice

In order for this transfer of ownership to happen successfully however, your people have to be proficient. They need to have the required skillsets. You need to have invested in building the right organisational capability. In her book Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, Patty McCord, co-creator of the famous Netflix culture deck, and Chief Talent Officer there from 1998-2012,  emphasised the importance of anchoring freedom and responsibility with capability. She shares her approach to helping teams address challenges ahead of them. The starting point is to imagine six months from now, you have the most amazing team you have ever assembled. The next step is to write down what the team will be accomplishing in six months’ time that it’s not accomplishing now. Next (and this is where the real magic starts) think about how things are being done differently from the way they are currently done. Are people working more cross-functionally? Doing more collaborative problem-solving? Have they developed greater project management skillsets? And the next step? You will have guessed it. McCord asks: in order for those different things to be happening, what would people need to know how to do? What kind of skills and experiences would it take for the team to operate in the way you’re describing and accomplish the things you’ll need to do in that future?

And this is the problem that many organisations make: they devolve ownership, without making sure their people have the skills to use it properly. Without making sure the right systems and processes are in place to facilitate it.

And a final word to the GB Women’s Gold medal winning Hockey Team

So we see that you have to work hard at it. It doesn’t just happen. And to reinforce this, I’ll highlight one of the most important initiatives that the GB Women’s Hockey coaching team put into place for the squad in the build up to the Rio Olympic Games: Thinking Thursdays. Wednesday night would find the players desperately checking their emails. Not to get news from friends and family, or catch up with personal admin, but to pick up that email; the email that contained the instructions for the next day’s tournament. Each week, different formats, different teams, and different rules were set. The players had complete ownership, from the moment the email dropped, for organising their teams and planning their approach. The goal was simple: to win the next day’s tournament. Players became as motivated to lead the Thinking Thursday wins table as they were to win Olympic Gold.

There was a further twist: during the tournament each Thursday, the coaching staff would throw in all sorts of things to drive the players off-balance. From changes of rules through to new outcomes. Throwing in an element of chaos. Testing recall. And testing and building the ability of the players to think on their feet. And adapt. Fast.

The purpose behind this initiative? To build the players’ ability to own the outcome. To take responsibility for it. And to give them the toolkit to do so.

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. For more detail on the area this blog covers, as well as many others, please do order a copy of my book - Staying the Distance: The Lessons From Sport That Business Leaders Have Been Missing. Links to buy the book can be found here I have also put together a collection of the podcasts, interviews and sessions on and in which I have recently been sharing my thoughts, stories and insight, which can be found here https://www.sportandbeyond.co.uk/blog/2023/10/30/staying-the-distance-podcasts

*https://hbr.org/2023/03/5-strategies-to-empower-employees-to-make-decisions