Our journey to arrive at Propel’s high performance methodology

Our journey to arrive at Propel’s high performance methodology?

This weekend, the Propel Performance Group team, alongside New Zealand Rugby, launched All Blacks Performance Labs. As part of this, we have shared the story of Propel’s methodology, which we also want to share here with our LinkedIn community.

Eight years ago, we began a journey to understand the difference between a team of champions and a championship team.

We spent time in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley's best and brightest, and while all their insights were expectedly phenomenal, the most fascinating outtake was where these C-suite leaders sent us next, to study surgical teams. A sector that carries out roughly 310 million procedures a year globally, with some of the highest stakes of any high performing environment. The epitome of performance under pressure.?

The life and death insights taken here were again world class. We then found ourselves studying the pit lanes of Formula One.? Team Ferrari as an example, made over 1,000 practice pit stops ahead of the 2023 season. The goal is to make the pit stop as repetitive as possible, without mistakes that could compromise the result. In 2022, 73% of Ferrari’s stops took less than three seconds. So far this year, they have raised that bar to 84%.?

We then found ourselves studying philharmonic orchestras. A philharmonic can consist of up to 100 musicians, led by a conductor who is aware that each gesture will have an impact, and that there is no room for an unintentional gesture. Every gesture means something.

And then elite soldiers from the New Zealand SAS, an environment so elite it has an 88% failure rate when it comes to selection.?

By reflecting on the common threads of all of these high performing environments, whether your tool is a scalpel or keyboard, or whether your work space is a board room or pit lane, we uncovered what we believed to be the DNA of championship teams. The learnings were distilled into simple methodologies, frameworks, and models summarised by three words: Me, We, Go. It is these three words that in volatile times, separate the best from the rest.

In most cases, executive and leadership teams are focused on the ‘Go’. They have stand-ups, they're collaborative and agile, they do sprints, they use OKRs, they break, but then they go again.?

But what we now know is that championship teams start earlier, with the ‘Me’ and the ‘We’ conversations. No, this is not the company values likely to be in your induction manual, but instead, what are our standards and rituals? How are we going to hold ourselves accountable? What will each individual bring to the team? This forms our scaffolding for high performance and the key to unlocking bigger and better outcomes.

What was identified across the eight-year journey is that every championship team, from Silicon Valley to the SAS, starts at the ‘Me’ level. Championship teams encourage individuals to consider? how they think, work and react under pressure. Do they fight, flight or freeze? Do they become the victim or the bully? The journey must start with public acknowledgment of these responses.?

It’s once teams crystalise the ‘Me’ for each person in a team environment that they truly discover how much each individual has in common. It’s through ‘Me’ conversations that individuals uncover what it means to belong, to be accepted for who you are, so you can be expected to perform at your best. Belonging is what we consider to be the core ethos of a high-performing environment.

This is the foundation of Propel’s methodology; a journey through the Me, the We, and the Go. This high performance coaching experience gives teams exclusive access to the DNA of what it takes to create and sustain high performance on a global stage.?