Personal learnings from the locker room

Have you ever felt anxious about going to work on a Monday? Ruminated over an awkward conversation or social faux pas? Been overcome with nerves that adversely impacted an important presentation or job interview? 

Let’s be honest, we’ve all felt pressure to perform at different times in our lives. As a national lacrosse player and international high performance lacrosse coach I’ve learnt to become assertive, decisive, disciplined, results focused and goal oriented. All the traits you would expect would hold me in good stead as a senior manager, a strategic leader and board advisor, right?

IF YOU ARE NOT GROWING AS A PERSON, THEN YOU ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE AS A PERSON

In business, I have worn my high performance sports athlete and coach hat in situations where perhaps I shouldn’t have. Being competitive, driving to a result and coaching others is in my DNA, so I have always brought a great deal of energy, a high level of motivation and great deal of pace to my professional life. But my colleagues often perceived this approach as being aggressive and bruising.

This feedback instigated deep self-reflection and the sharp realisation that high performance sport is actually nothing like work, and most business environments have very little in common with national sporting teams. Unlike sporting teams, large organisations can often feel chaotic and undisciplined, with slow decision-making. Business objectives and priorities are numerous and ever changing. Team have wide ranging capabilities, very different levels of motivation and a variety of competing pressures outside of work. 

There are, however some important lessons from the sporting field that can help us become better leaders and build better teams. The All Blacks have a saying “if you are not growing as a person, then you are not going anywhere as a person.” As we move towards mass occupational displacement and increased automation of jobs, are there lessons from the locker room that can help us be ready for the fourth industrial age?

THE CHANGING FACE OF WORK

A McKinsey report forecasts that the number of jobs worldwide that will be automated by 2030 is estimated to be 400 million (15% of the global workforce). The need for resilience and adaptability to meet the changing needs of an increasingly automated, competitive and fast past corporate environment will require training and discipline if we are to succeed. 

A holistic approach to skill development is something high performance sport teams are very good at. Athletes aren’t born with all the skills to win: performance psychologists focus on helping athletes with goal setting, mindset and coping with anxiety that can impede performance. 

Some key performance skills that I learned in my playing and coaching career can greatly assist us to adapt to change more readily, learn new skills and add new value in different ways. Of most benefit is the key to staying motivated; how to handle adversity and setbacks; how get into the right mindset and maintain it; how to push through even when the mind is saying give up, and how deal with anxiety and self-doubt.

PERFORMANCE SKILLS LIST

• Setting a Big Hairy Audacious Goal – think like the best, perform like the best, and you will become the best through behavioural and process oriented goal setting.
• Obstacle planning – break down obstacles to success and planning strategies to overcome these obstacles.
• Be present – remind yourself why you set these goals in the first place and be mindful of these at all times.
• Embrace anxiety and ambiguity – be open, honest and accountable to your fears. After all, we all have them.
• Explore mental toughness – tackle the hard tasks ahead with a mindset of growth through adversity.
• Maintain positive and powerful body language – think big and resilient and you will be.
• The power of reflection – be self aware, self-reflective and learn through success and failure at every step.

OUR UNIVERSAL RIGHT TO LEARN

The World Economic Forum has called industries current approaches to on-the-job training and continuous learning as insufficient and inadequate. We are heavily biased towards the development of technical skills and just assume sound development of increasingly important non-technical skills to be acquired along the way, as a consequence of undertaking other project and activities. It’s Universal Right to Learn call to action implores more training and re-skilling focused on performance: building creative, entrepreneurial and technological skills for the fourth industrial revolution.

So what if we taught performance skills in the workplace to all employees, irrespective of their position in the organisation? What do you think the increase in productivity could be over the long term if more people in your organisation were less resistant to change, were more resilient to set backs, took on feedback better, were able to provide feedback to other more easily, were more motivated, were more agile in learning new skills, were more verbally confident, spoke up and shared the ideas more freely, were able to deal with ambiguity better, were able to focus on the task in hand, were able to make decisions in the moment with confidence that their thinking process was sound?

In my next blog post, I’ll evidence some of the world’s largest corporations actively implementing programs within their businesses that align with the World Economic Forum’s Universal Right to Learn.