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Performance!
As a British cyclist, I was glued to the TV for the Olympics,
watching medal after medal being won in cycling by Team GB. In all,
15 Olympic and Paralympic golds! Following on from previous successes
at the Athens Olympics and the World Track Championships, it was
an astounding team performance!
Performance Director David Brailsford was asked about the launch
point for this amazing success. "Quite simply," he replied,
"I think we have a greater desire to succeed than our competition,
which means that we are brutally honest about our current performance
levels, and totally willing to learn from our mistakes."
Dave Brailsford's reply catapulted me straight back to my work arena.
There had to be a valuable message here for all of us who have a
passion for business excellence. Why do some business teams achieve
surprisingly high performance levels and other similarly equipped
teams fail to do so? Why do we see so many businesses go through
boom-to-bust-to-boom cycles? What does it take to become a consistent
winner these days?
I certainly believe that, in Darwinian terms, "survival of
the fittest" increasingly means spotting and responding to
the incessant barrage of competitive challenges and market disruptions.
If performance excellence is increasingly about fast and effective
adaptation, then for me Dave Brailsford's remarks are right on the
money. So, what can we learn from his gold-medal-winning team?
To start the debate off, I can point to what I see as three important
factors: awareness of current performance levels compared to the
competition, collective desire to achieve a shared ambition or goal,
and ability to learn. Let me expand on these:
1. Awareness ...
As a young Army Officer, I was once tasked with planning an attack
on an enemy position. For hours I pored over maps, studying known
friendly and enemy dispositions, weather, tide, intelligence reports,
and so on. I got completely bogged down in my thinking. I had lost
clarity. My Commanding Officer offered me a twenty-minute flight
in a helicopter to sight the ground over which we were to advance.
Twenty-one minutes later I had a crystal clear plan in my head and
knew exactly what we had to do. I had quite literally gained altitude
over my problem. Heightened my awareness.
I think the business world is evolving faster than management is
adapting. We are, as a cadre of managers, poorly prepared to deal
with the rate of change we now face. Some of us are in denial about
this, some are simply confused by it, and some have willingly embraced
the renewal imperative.
Do you have "altitude" over your organisation, or are
you bogged down in the detail? Do you have a brutally clear view
of your current performance? Can you define the competitive challenges
and disruptive forces at work on you? Does everybody in your organisation
know, understand, and care about the adaptive strategy as much as
you do? Honest answers to questions like these can differentiate
the next generation of winners from the future also-rans.
2. Collective desire ...
Many contemporary managers are from a generation that has not experienced
the hardships of economic depression or wide-scale warfare. Full
employment, violence-free lives, and comfortable retirements are
seen as reasonable expectations. Many of us who have done well in
the developed world have simply become too comfortable and too complacent.
I see many well-established businesses that, as part of an increasingly
individualistic society, have become temples of high individual
aspiration but low collective or corporate ambition. Take the present
credit crunch as an example. To what extent have we all been denying
or ignoring the onset of the now inevitable crisis? Will this denial
prove to be a contributory factor to the scale of the eventual havoc
it causes us all? Even now, people still seem to believe they can
escape unscathed!
If leadership is "the art of getting others to want to struggle
for shared aspirations" (from leadership researchers Jim Kouzes
& Barry Posner), I see too many businesses that are suffering
from being over managed and under led. I often ask clients "Isn't
our performance struggling from a lack of people who are struggling?"
Gold medals certainly don't come without a struggle!
I regularly present the above leadership definition to management
audiences. Almost invariably, managers in the West tell me that
they have a problem with the word "struggle." I can assure
you that in Bucharest, Talin, Moscow, Mumbai, Casablanca, and Chishinau,
managers never question the word "struggle." Why is that?
Are you as hungry for your organisation's success as the average
Latvian, Indian, Russian, Estonian, Romanian, or Moldovan is for
theirs? Do you really love what you do at work, or are you really
funding a lifestyle that you love?
3. Learn ...
I want to discuss two factors in this context, failure and speed.
Failure is a taboo subject in many management teams to the point
where it is, paradoxically, inhibiting their performance. In a fear-charged,
non-collaborative, and non-purposeful context, the key post-failure
survival competence is blame avoidance, not learning. This kills
the natural propensity of an organism to learn from experience and
adapt itself for the future. It also seems to me that the larger
the organisation, the more hiding failures is likely to be a key
management skill, and the more opportunities to do so exist!
Now speed, or rather the lack of it! In the military environment,
where speed of reaction often determines survival, soldiers at all
levels are taught "naturalistic" decision-making, that
is (1) Rapidly identify three options open to you, (2) On gut feel,
go with one of the three options, BUT assume that whichever one
you choose will ... (3) Need substantial revision once you are underway.
This degree of decisiveness engenders life-saving reaction speeds.
How many management teams would deploy decision-making strategies
of this type across their businesses? Even in those that have, step
(3) above, the preparedness to revise a chosen course of action,
or lack thereof, is the biggest source of eventual performance failure.
It used to be conventional wisdom that the big organisation would
eventually triumph over the small. High rates of disruption, challenge
and change mean that it is now the fast that will usually succeed
over the slow. Which are you? What happens in your organisation
when things go wrong? Does the performance of your business benefit
from failure? Does your organisation make decisions in a naturalistic
way? What speed penalty do you pay for your need for security? Do
you get the balance right?
My conclusion from all this ...
I think Dave Brailsford was pointing us at the human art of performance:
respectively, human awareness, human desire, and human ability to
learn. The tragedy for many organisations is that they have become
too scientific. They are places where managers apply pressure to
performance levers rather than lead people to perform.
Still, not to worry. Given time, natural selection will take care
of things!
Chris Nel
TPC!UK
Consultant, Facilitator,
Keynote Speaker
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