How to be the best of the best and 10X the rest

For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by peak performance.

It particularly intrigues me how some people outperform the rest of us by such a margin. They are not just 5 or 10% better, they are TENFOLD (10X) better than the average, if not much much more.

This phenomenon is most apparent in the world of sports. Female peak performers include Graf, Com?neci, Williams (below), Joyner, Hamm. Male outliers include Ali, Jordan, Pelé, Bolt and Phelps.

But we need to go back a lot further to find the greatest male and female athletes of all time.

Larisa Latynina (born in 1934) is the greatest female Olympian ever (pictured above and below). A Soviet gymnast she won 14 Olympic medals including 9 gold medals over 3 different Olympics between 1956 and 1964. Her medal total was surpassed only by Michael Phelps after 48 years in July of 2012.

To this day Latynina’s record for individual event medals has not been surpassed by any man or women in any Olympic sport. Latynina was so dedicated to the sport that she even competed at the 1958 World Championships in Moscow while four months pregnant.

The prize however to the greatest athlete of all time across all sports across the Earth goes to the legendary cricket batsman Sir Don Bradman (born in 1908). His average score in test cricket was 99.94, a fact well known by most Aussies. No one else in history has even come close. Of batsmen to have played at least 20 test innings, none average above 70, only four above 60.

'The Don' (picture above) is so far apart from anyone else that has ever played cricket that it almost doesn't make sense how he could have been that good. There are some absolute icons of the game, and many of them averaged just over half of Bradman's lifetime average.

To put it into a modern perspective fellow Australia batsman Steve Smith has statistically been ranked the 2nd best of all time. Smith averages 64.

To put it into a basketball perspective it’s the equivalent of Bradman shooting 50 points per game when the average for the top 50 basketballers across history is somewhere between 27 and 30.

Michael Jordan (pictured below) is often said to be the greatest of all time across all sports but Jordan’s average points per game was only 30.1. Bradman was the outlier of outliers!

We can find plenty of outliers in the world of work too.

I interviewed Bain’s Michael Mankins some years ago and he shared how in repetitive transactional tasks the best performers are typically two or three times as productive as others.

Mankins shared a story about Justo Thomas, the best fish butcher at Le Bernardin restaurant in New York, can portion as much fish in an hour as the average prep cook can manage in three hours.

“In highly specialized or creative work, the differential is likely to be a factor of six or more. Before becoming chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts prevailed in 25 of the 39 cases he argued before the Court. That record is almost nine times better than the average record of other winning attorneys (excluding solicitors general) who have argued before the Court since 1950.” [Excerpts above and below from HBR]

Mankins calls such outliers ‘A Players’ and they can be found in all sorts of jobs as the image below reveals.

Of course the outlier phenomenon is not unique to individual pursuits. There are some great examples of outlier teams that Mankins also highlights as follows.

Example 1: Apple OSX Development Team

It took just 600 Apple engineers less than two years to develop, debug, and deploy OS X, a revolutionary change in the company’s operating system. By contrast, it took as many as 10,000 engineers more than five years to develop, debug, deploy, and eventually retract Microsoft’s Windows Vista.

Example 2: Kyle Busch’s NASCAR Pit Crew

Kyle Busch’s six-man crew (pictured above) is widely considered the finest on the NASCAR circuit. Crew members train together year-round with one clear goal in mind: to get Busch’s #18 racer in and out of the pit in the shortest possible time. The crew can execute a standard pit stop—73 maneuvers, including refueling and a change of all four tires—in 12.12 seconds. Add just one average player to Busch’s crew—say, an ordinary tire changer—and that time nearly doubles, to 23.09 seconds.

Example 3: The Pixar Brain Trust

No other movie studio (animation or otherwise) comes close to Pixar’s record of almost back to back successes as revealed in the table below.

Central to Pixar's success is what co-founder Ed Catmull (pictured below) refers to as the Brain Trust, i.e. the team that reviews the development of each movie. According to Ed...

"Every one of our films, when we start off, they suck... our job is to take it from something that sucks to something that doesn't suck."

That’s what the Brain Trust does.

Great stories Rich but what can I learn from all this and how can I apply it to my team?

Excellent question and one I will answer from a team perspective given that 99.9% of us work and perform in a team environment.

To become an outlier team, one that outperforms the rest by 10X or more, there are numerous factors worth considering but some are more heavily weighted than others. One of the heaviest to weigh in Catmull talks about in the video below as he describes the four principles of the Brain Trust.

The Four Principles of the Pixar Brain Trust

1. No one can override the director – this removes the power structure in room
2. Peer to peer – not boss to film maker or boss talking to employee, everyone is equal
3. We have a vested interest in each other’s success – when you win we win
4. Give and take honest notes – vulnerability, openness and transparency.?

Catmull in his own words is describing a culture high in two key ingredients to outlier performance, i.e. trust AND psychological safety.?

Both trust and psychological safety are essential to 10X team performance. One is not possible without the other. Outlier teams need to work on both.

I have written about both concepts previously (see here and here) so won’t unpack them in full in this article. But it is worth briefly understanding the difference between the two.

Trust is an interpersonal concept.

Trust is a function of perceived character and competence between individuals according to Stephen Covey. You will be more trusted by another person when they believe you have the following qualities.

1. Integrity - you?say what you mean and?mean what you say, you?honor commitments
2. Intent -?it is clear?why you?do what you do, so often misunderstood as people judge us by our actions
3. Capabilities - strong?match between your?job requirements and your talents, attitudes, skills, knowledge and style
4. Results - being responsible for your results and open to understanding when results are negative.

Psychological safety is a group level concept.

Psychological safety is function of the perceived culture within a group.

According to Professor Amy Edmondson (pictured below) it is "a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, [i.e.] a sense of confidence that others will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up".

Trust between individuals is an antecedent to psychological safety but is not sufficient for psychological safety in the group.

Psychological safety requires a number of factors to manifest on a group level, as follows:

1. Trust - the group has a standard of trusting each others' character and competence, extending trust before it is earned.
2. Respect - the group norm is to treat each other with civility making all feel like they belong (owed respect) and people feel valued when contributing (earned respect) as defined by management professor Kristie Rogers here in HBR.
3. Care - a culture in which people "give a damn, sharing more than just [their] work self, and encouraging everyone [ ] to?do?the same" according to ex-Googler Kim Scott here in her book Radical Candor.

Trust levels vary from individual to individual. Psychological safety varies between teams.

So how can you build trust and psychological safety?

Again Catmull describes it beautifully in the video when talking about how the Brain Trust is set up to ensure the movie directors feel psychologically safe.

“It is the directors project. They are the ones responsible. The reason we have to remove the power structure is if they [the directors] know the group can override them they will enter the room in a defensive posture, and that will make it so they don’t listen. By [the others] saying the choice is really yours, then they can listen and they will treat the comments as comments to help them.”

The Brain Trust has clearly articulated principles that create a culture high in trust and psychological safety. The army calls their principles a code. Others call them rules of engagement. Some call them standards. Whatever you call them the key thing is that you have them and they build trust and psychological safety if you want to be an outlier team.

The ultimate goal is to create a space where team magic can happen. In Catmull’s words…

“Every once in a while the magic happens. And by magic I mean the loss of ego in the room. And what you see are ideas going at it, it doesn’t matter whether they are bad or good, nobodies clinging to them, we’re just focused on the problem. It’s an amazing event when this happens.”

My best to you in 10X’ing your team’s performance on your journey to becoming outliers.?

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Rich Hirst is a leadership, change and high performance psychologist. His insights are based on real world experiences from his work with 10,000+ leaders and over 1,000 CEOs, underpinned by his knowledge as an organisational psychologist and expertise as a change agent supporting organisations for more than 20 years going through major transformation.

For more information please go to?www.richhirst.com?or contact me via email on?rich@richhirst.com. Please find below links to my previous monthly posts.

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3. 7 Tips to World Class Performance
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