Team Pride

Are you benefiting from these obvious, but powerful group dynamics? With the focus of feedback and development work, that we've seen, being upon "what people need to improve on", there's not much chance of extra pride washing around that teams can benefit from. In fact, quite the opposite - the majority of people feeling pretty insecure about what they've got to offer and waiting for someone "more informed" to offer solutions or take a lead. You really do reap what you sow when it comes feedback, team mindset and performance... so what are you doing this week to ensure that the Pride commodity is optimised within your teams?

There's probably a personal responsibility element here too and we'd suggest that each of you work out for yourself why you should feel proud of your performances. (Pretty sure Heather Small wrote a song lyric like that!). In lieu of someone else raising your pride for you, take the high performance approach, and raise your own pride as much as you can.

There is the old saying that pride comes before a fall... but better to benefit from the pride in the first place than to avoid becoming proud for fear of the health and safety implications. And of course, old sayings are there to be proved as complete nonsense and we'd certainly recommend that anything you focus on to make yourself proud is well grounded in reality and therefore does not lead to a falsely elevated view of yourself. Reality based pride can be nothing but a good thing - surely?

If you were only judged on one thing...

so, for April you can only be judged on one thing... your colleagues will shape their view of you based around this one thing... your managers and leaders will identify your value to the business based upon this same one thing... people outside of the business will make their judgements of you on just this one factor... and most importantly, you will draw all of your confidence from this one, critical element of performance.

So, what is that one element of performance for you? What key variable do you want to focus 100% on? When all of your performance boils down to just one thing, how good can you make that quality? What can you do each day to become a little better at the crucial factor? Who can you get advice from that will help you raise your game? What questions will you ask of yourself and of your colleagues to make sure you're constantly delivering the best possible performance?

Choose carefully and see what you can learn about yourself by making your performance a very pure focus.

Be yourself...

If you do a great job of developing your confidence because you;

1. know your strengths
2. value those strengths
3. know how to exploit those strengths consistently,

then it is very likely that you can keep asking a simple question of yourself in order to perform at your best

"how confident am I that I can be myself today?"

hopefully, everyone should always be 100% confident that they can be themselves, you just have to put in the ground work to make sure that being yourself means something powerful to you.

Microsoft Office...

... is apparently a very good place to work indeed (if you use some criteria we like!).

In their recent advert about ideas, or keeping it weird, the Microsoft advert states how they work on keeping it human and keeping it real, in the workplace. The advert goes on to say how, "you have to have an environment where people are comfortable sharing ideas. Anything we're working on has to be out in the open, where anybody can see it and feel they can build on it... so we do everything possible to keep people as connected as possible and put about as much work into the culture as you would in the products that you've created".

It's interesting to not attention being paid to the value add of culture and connectedness. This is very much "process" AND "outcome" thinking working together - get the human inputs right and focussed on allowing the talent to be free of unnecessary noise and the results that you're after are more likely to be delivered more consistently and more effectively. Within highly competitive markets AND in an environment that is making it tough to perform, it becomes even more important to focus on the human variables that it's clear make a difference to performance. Make sure that people have a real sense of control over their performance - how they do things and when they do them. Make sure people recognise how their role is valued by the organisation and absolutely essential to the success of everybody. Keep people focused on building on each other's work and knowing how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Control, Confidence and Connectedness are things we talk about ad infinitum and now, more than ever, the businesses that optimise these three elements of motivation will really differentiate themselves from the competition.

An experiment...

We'd like to invite you all to take part in an experiment - and of course let us know any results you might experience.

We talk a lot about the importance of feedback and the fact that elite performers crave feedback and seek it out, rather than waiting for it to "happen" to them once or twice per year in during a performance review. So, instead of perpetuating a less than useful attitude towards feedback we'd like you to see what happens when you do the following:

1. Identify something that you're working on and attempting to improve/change/refine (this might be making a strength stronger, rather than just developing a weakness).
2. Start working on that thing very deliberately.
3. Make some notes around feedback to yourself about what you've noticed as a result of your efforts.
4. After you've been working on it for a while, find a colleague who you would like to hear from and tell them that you've been working on the thing you've been working on and whether they have any feedback specifically about that bit of your performance - don't just spring it on them, give them time to think and reflect and then give them chance to pass any feedback to you that they believe to be useful (you might have to remind them that feedback is simply that and should not be heard as "can you point out to me things that need improving"!)
5. Listen to the feedback they provide you with and compare it to your own thoughts.
6. Decide what you want to do with the feedback.

We'd be interested to see if you find this any more helpful than simply asking "can you give me some feedback on how I've been performing recently?"

Looking forward to seeing your results!

Do you run the numbers...

or do they run you? (a great line from Accenture... thanks for that!). Just been reading about Kevin Pietersen, the England cricketer, getting out for 97. He was out playing a typically KPish type shot. KP, please stay true to yourself and keep playing the way you play. Ignore the ill-informed, myopic commentators who believe that a number is more important than a performance. Had Pietersen scored 101 and then got out with the same kind of shot, he'd still be criticised, but not as much as he is now.
Why? Because he'd have had a score on the board that had 3 figures against it, rather than 2 (which are very, very nearly 3). Had he got out in the same way for 156, he'd have been criticised less again, because the number was bigger. Had he got our for 36 in the same way, less criticism again.

Here's a quote from the BBC, "Pietersen has now missed out on two Test centuries which he would have achieved and that must hurt" (BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew). Why must is hurt? It hurts if Pietersen defines himself by numbers rather than talent. It hurts if Pietersen is more worried about his personal statistical record than taking any opportunity he sees to score runs. It hurts if Pietersen is aiming to suppress his natural ability and let just 1 element of performance feedback cloud his judgement, change his thinking and redefine himself as a performer.

Fortunately, KP does not think like the commentator who is imposing a limiting mentality on a player that has a superb performance temperament.

Never, let the pursuit of an arbitrarily determined number get in the way of your quest to make the most of your talent. You control numbers, they should not control you. KP, we applaud you. Thankfully, you are not a sufferer from number fixation syndrome!

Do what I know...

It was interesting watching a clip of Cathy Freeman yesterday reflecting on her gold medal success at the Sydney Olympics, in front of 112,000 people, carrying the hopes of a nation and performing under a huge weight of expectation.

In the midst of all of that hype, excitement, pressure, hope and expectation, as she warmed up, Cathy Freeman simply kept repeating to herself, "Do what I know, Do what I know". Nothing more complicated than that. Some incredibly powerful, simple, self-instruction. Under all that scrutiny, what did she know she could do? She knew she could do what she knew she could. She knew her abilities in detail and simply had to trust that they would be there when she needed them most (no reason to believe they'd suddenly disappear!). No self-instruction like "win gold" or "don't screw up" - simply, "do what I know", which is all about the process. Get the process right and you maximise the chances of getting the outcome you know you're capable of.

So, do you know yourself well enough to trust what you'd get when you do what you know? Have you spent enough time thinking about your process, so that you can trust it under the most intense pressure (as well as when you're having an easier time)?

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, so someone once said, but to be as simple as that, you have to have studied yourself and accepted your abilities in some detail. Go on, be in a position where you can do what you know, and enjoy doing it.

Compete on Preparation...

It's clear to us that when the conditions are favourable, people get very used to being able to get away with minimal preparation - your natural talents, allied with the helpful environment, conspire to get you to where you want to be. The conditions lull you into a false sense of security about how much preparation you need to carry out in order to get the "result" you're after.

So, the conditions change and now the result is much harder to achieve, and perhaps the confidence that was once there (based purely on repeat outcomes, rather than being built up from the process that produced the result), has now gone missing. Instead of the result being "inevitable", you've now got to get world class, very quickly, at preparing. How can you use the pre-performance time to maximum effect? Where should you be focusing your energies in order to ensure that you fully exploit the preparation time that you have?

There is an art to preparation, and the elite athletes we know are superb at gaining competitive advantage (not to mention enormous confidence), from being world class at preparing: leaving no stone unturned, focusing their energies on the things that will give them maximum return on time invested, not to mention preparing every bit of their performance pie (and not just the obvious technical and tactical preparation).

So, how good are you at gaining a head start through your preparation? When times are tough, exact every piece of advantage from every opportunity afforded to you. As Eric Cantona once said (no, not the seagulls thing), "It’s easy to battle it out on the pitch without having prepared fully and then say ‘I gave it my all’. The point is that if you had prepared carefully you would have had more to give and you’d have played better." Says it all really. Thanks, Eric, much better than trawlers and seagulls!

Footballer Wisdom...

Two words I thought I'd never write next to each other... an oxymoron if ever there was one!

However, take a look at this from Robbie Keane, the Liverpool benchwarmer.

"I'm not being big-headed but I've scored a lot of goals in the last 10 years and it's not just going to go away like that," he told BBC Radio 5 Live."

"I never get down about things. Some players get their head down and cry but I'm too mentally strong for that."

"I've only been here a few months and sometimes it does take a little time to settle in. I prefer to be judged a little further down the line than now."

In keeping with the previous post... he knows his talents aren't just going to go away like that. We're backing him to carry on being a great player. Robust confidence in action folks. How do you compare to Robbie?

Track Records and Perspective

A quick thought for you...

Step 1. Look back over your career and identify your top 10 career highlights (or 5 if you're pushed for time!)

Step 2. You're a common denominator in all of those highlight performances. Which of your personal qualities shine through as instrumental to success in each of those occasions? Are there one or two qualities that are ever presents in all of the successes? Are there any qualities in there that you've taken for granted or forgotten about?

Step 3. Looking back over the last month, how and where have you deliberately exploited those qualities that are obviously so important to your success? How effectively have you been playing to the strengths that you have?

Step 4. Whilst taking some time off over Christmas, when your thoughts turn to work, why not spend some time planning how you're going to kick-off your performances in 2009 completely led by your qualities from step 2. How are you going to bring those qualities to life, one day at a time as you face the early challenges of a new year?

Planning how you're going to perform to your strengths will bring you an extra few essential bits of control and confidence over your performance when you need it most and will help to start the year in style. This helps with controlling the situation and not letting the situation you're in control you.

Talents...

When we're in circumstances that look and feel totally foreign, we can often conclude that we don't have appropriate skills to deal with what we're facing. That conclusion comes from focusing on the situation as unique, unexpected, threatening and basically unwanted!

However, if you're aware of all of your talents that have led you to be successful (both contemporarily and historically), then you can start asking yourself some useful questions in relation to what your recipe for success has been, such as:

• What talents do I have that consistently help me deliver success? Which bits of me always play a part in the successes I have? (because no doubt I should be leading with these strenghts now)
• What successes have I achieved in the past, in different roles or circumstances, that used some talents that I've stopped using more recently? (can you bring these "forgotten" talents to life to help now?)
• Rather than just thinking about your "technical" talents in your job, which bits of your personality are going to be particularly helpful right now when dealing with novel challenges?

If you focus on your talent pool and identify/target your talents appropriately, you'll find your confidence levels are likely to be higher.

Next step thinking...

The concept of "next step thinking" came up last week in a conversation. This is all about focusing on being in the moment and being confident that you can do the next thing you need to do with complete focus and confidence. It seems that this is very important at the moment. Much of our thinking, confidence and focus is constantly tempered by a view to the future and a sense check of whether we're going to "deliver the result". We rely heavily on this barometer of future success to give us a sense of belief in the here and now and as a result we confuse personal confidence to perform with our perception of expected future success.

So, given that the ability to predict the future and work out that everything is going to be o.k. seems to be a near impossibility at the moment we have a couple of choices.

1) Choose the fact that we can no longer predict the future and become very stressed and have a constant feeling of impending doom with us every step along the way, or
2) Accept that information about the future is essential, but untrustworthy at the moment, so focus on building the future one step at a time.

If we focus on the next step and think about all the reasons why we are completely confident that we can take the next step with the required skill, style and commitment, then we have a chance of getting on a confidence roll. We all still have the same skills, abilities, knowledge and experience, so it's essential to keep focused on applying these skills to new sets of problems that arise.

So, what's your next step today?

Darren Bent and the World Economy...

We thought you might like to read this piece by Alan Hansen on the BBC Website about the remarkable transformation in the football player Darren Bent. It struck us that if only Harry Redknapp could be let loose on the world economy, he might have a similar impact on global confidence levels. Hansen's bottom line view is that talent is nothing without confidence - you might have all of the abilities in the world, but without confidence, you won't be the fully potent force you might be.

Think of all of the talent that is currently being forgotten because of a dearth of confidence. If you read some of our earlier stuff on confidence, you'll see we believe confidence to be something that should always come from within and shouldn't rely on external influences to determine it. However, we know the reality is that people struggle to have the very self-defined confidence, so we would suggest the following. Instead of focusing on lack of confidence in the current world around you;

1. Ask yourself whether you can be the best performer going in an atmosphere that's lacking confidence - can you still deliver better than others right now because of the talents that you have?
2. If confidence was never going to come back, what would you start to look to in order to get a sense of surviving and performing in that very different world?
3. Despite confidence being lacking, what factors are constant around you that let you know there is still a performance to be delivered and key processes to go through, all of which are in your control to deliver to a greater or lesser level of effectiveness?

Let us know what answers you come up with and if this starts to get you thinking differently about how confidence might work for you.

Competitive Learning...

Something we work on a lot in the world of high performance sport revolves around the concept of "competitive learning". If we can learn quicker, more effectively and produce performance refinements quicker than the opposition (between races or matches, or within a tournament), then we know we're gaining a competitive advantage when we're not head to head.

Imagine how much speed of learning and reaction to learning is critical in the current climate. Agility is often talked about with the corporate world (are you agile or fragile?, etc). However, agility has to be the result of great learning through superb knowledge of your own performance and extreme confidence to be able to make the right decisions about how to alter your focus or intent.

Individual or collective learning is a skill, so you have to practise it to get better at it. Just hoping you'll get better at learning quickly in these highly pressured times simply doesn't cut it. Maybe by working out how learning can be competitively advantageous for you, you'll be able to decide how you might invest more effectively in this critical element of performance.

If you can get access to this Harvard Business Review article, it's well worth a read to help clarify one particular way in which learning might work for you. (Learning in the thick of it).

Come and pick our brains about how competitive learning works - can you afford not to right now, when every experience is precious and every performance moment counts?

Performance Intelligence...

So, how Performance Intelligent are you?

We've got a simple formula that you can begin to think through that will help you begin to work out what your PI score is.

There's four questions to ask yourself:

How well do I know the world that I have to perform in?
How well do I know my own performance ingredients that are unique to me?
How well do I turn knowledge about my world into effective strategy to deliver?
How consistently do I deliver a performance that exploits all of my unique ingredients?

Have a think about those things and see if you are 100% confident in your answers to the questions. If you're left with an uneasy feeling about the honest appraisal of the questions, then there's probably some pretty simple solutions for helping decrease your concern over the area in question.

We're pretty sure that people who can answer all of the questions with 100% conviction and confidence are very Performance Intelligent. The more Performance Intelligent you are, the greater control you have over delivering results with certainty. Now, wouldn't that be a nice feeling to have - knowing you're going to deliver!

Valuing the difference you make to People?

I love the piece on Mental Toughness but mostly the thought about choosing to see your confidence as valuing the difference you can make to people. I have never chosen to think about my confidence in this way, I think I've always chosen to shy away from the view of being seen as confident and resilient and preferring to just think of having a 'Positive' 'Can do' attitude. But it is so much more than that when I reflect on when I feel most motivated and performing at my best it's when I am adding value for my team. It's when I know my performance has made a real difference for a particular individual or team. Recognising and appreciating your own attributes in this way, I think I've always worried could be seen by some as over confidence or even arrogance. Now I just think I've been letting myself and others down by not choosing to see my value in this way. I may have been adding value quite unconsciously but now how much better am I going to be!

Mental Toughness...

In some research we were involved in a few years ago, we found a couple of interesting things out about people who were voted as very mentally tough by folks who understood their world.

First thing was that mentally tough people had confidence that didn't break down easily - it wasn't necessarily very, very high confidence, but was more characterised as robust. Any thoughts about how robust your confidence is (confidence in your own abilities!)?

The other interesting thing about the mentally tough folks was that they always thought the team would perform better if they were around, because they knew what qualities they bought to any team they were on. If they weren't there, these obvious qualities would be missing, so the team wouldn't have their undoubted strengths to draw upon. So, why is your team better off because you're part of it and are you maximising the benefits of you being around right now?

If you're going to be mentally tough, you have to invest some time working out how to make your confidence robust and how to ensure you're valuing the difference you make to people. There's more to it than that, but those were two highlight points that seem pertinent right now!

Confidence is priceless - and expensive

Reading The Times this week, Ben Mcintyre reminded me of something that Miss McIntosh taught me in 1971. 2+2 = 4. The maths is true and is the same this year as it was last, but something has changed - what we have lost is not the ability to add up but something much more precious; confidence. Apparently it can't be bought, even for $700bn, £500bn or any other made up numbers flying around at the moment. Despite enormous sums being thrown at it, confidence is not (yet) responding.

The impact of this quality going AWOL? JK Galbraith said that "when people are cautious, questioning, misanthropic, suspicious or mean, they are immune to speculative enthusiasms." Put another way, when there's no confidence, the ability to have a mindset focused on positive performance disappears. I'm not saying we should ignore reality - far from it. I am saying that in the face of reality, the only high performance response is to choose to focus on the confidence qualities that sit inside every individual and team we work with and are not dependent on changing conditions. For them 2+2 still equals 4. Miss McIntosh will be much relieved.

Be Careful What You Wish For

My performance has, more than ever before, been at the forefront of my mind recently.

I have just started a new role...same company...new role though. When first approached about the job, I thought "Wow, what a great opportunity; a new challenge without the usual upheaval and culture refamiliarisation required with a move to a new organisation."

I couldn't have been more wrong.

It seems I had underestimated the impact of my identity loss...I was Head of Blah, now I am Head of a Different Blah. All of a sudden I went from a position of clarity, focus, confidence and control to...well...not clarity, not focus, not confidence and not control!

All this and the credit crunch! Oh woe is me.

Woe is me, until I reflected upon some of the stuff I was discussing with a colleague recently in a coaching session (well, there is nothing quite like taking your own medicine is there?). In this reflective moment I recalled some self talk of recent times...in fact it might not just have been self-talk, more like blatant-open-talking-to-anyone-who-would-listen...

I can recall saying, thinking and affirming..."I need a new challenge!", "I'm getting a bit bored", "I learn best when I am out of my comfort zone", "I feel like I want to get my teeth stuck into something different", "I need to move on"...you know what I mean, don't you?

And I am reminded of the saying "Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it". I have wished for and manifested this situation...so why on earth am I spending my time in woe? Why aren't I doing what I do best - learning when out of my comfort zone?

So, I make the choice now. I am getting on with it, enjoying the ride and learning...and being careful what I wish for!

Happy Friday!

Keeping your head...

...while all others around you are doing a good impression of something without a head, requires a lot of mental toughness.

Like anything that's difficult, the more you prepare for the challenge, the more of a fighting chance of success you have when the key moments actually arrive. So, given that the playing field has changed somewhat at the moment, the need for top quality preparation becomes ever more important. We've learned a lot from helping people prepare for key sporting moments... and we think what we've learned translates pretty well.

We could write a lot on mental toughness and mental preparation, but that's probably for another day. So, instead of that, have a look at our thoughts on how to use 3 cornerstones of performance (control, confidence and connectedness) to help you have the best chance of delivering a great performance, even when the world around you is making it very tough to do so. It works for people at the Olympic Games... so can it work for you?

Once you've read it, tell us what you think! Go on, we'd love to know that you think.