This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 175

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Open Kitchen: 5 x Unconventional Concepts from Elite Sports

The summer of sports continues with the opening of the 2024 Paris Olympics last weekend. I'm a sports fan, so I'm going to get into it and I'm looking forward to discovering new sports (breakdancing I think is there now?), as well getting engaged in old favourites like weightlifting, gymnastics, diving and swimming competitions in week 1, whilst we wait for the guaranteed drama of track and field in week 2.

Business can learn a great deal from elite sports competition. Sports is, after all, experiments in recruitment, assessment, training and execution. For us non-athetes its the natural place to go when we're looking for ways to get better. We probably all know about the Margin Gain Theory but we our knowledge acquisition has a long way to go. I'm going to use today's Open Kitchen to discuss 5 more theories which I think should be better known.

1. Expand Performance Cage - Become 'Outcome Irrelevant'

I first learned about 'performance cages' from a book by written by sports psychology Willo Railo, in conjunction with former England manager Sven Goran Ericsson. The performance cage describes the level of performance which you personally accept is the correct level for you. It has both upper and lower boundaries where anxiety ensues because you are performing at a level incongruent with your self perception. We are all very familar with the lower boundary - we have a bad performance, we end up questioning ourselves and think about quitting. But we might less familiar with the upper boundary where we have a performance which far exceeds what we think we are capable of. We then proceed to subconsciously sabotage our performance in order to get back into our performance change or 'comfort zone'.

What was truly interesting about Railo's concept was that in order to raise performance to a consistently higher level, the action is not to raise this upper boundary, but to lower the lower boundary. Expand the comfort zone, rather than raise the cage. The idea is that in sports competition you do not control the outcome - there are other elite competitors - so what you have to do is reduce the moments of anxiety during competition. In other words, 'fail and forget' and get back into your performance in as short a time as possible, as the competition is still going on.

In the first day of Olympic competition, we saw two gymnasts, both medal favourites, fall off the equipment during the routine. The error was clearly on their minds, as they each individually fell off again. According to Railo's thesis, these athletes had very high upper boundary of the performance cage, but also a high lower boundary, which meant they were unable to recover from errors which will be inevitable in competition.

So how to do you expand the performance cage?

You practice how to fail. Or more precisely, practice so much so you understand all the ways in which you can fail, and then measure the time it takes for you to get back to elite performance. Interesting eh?

2. Rotate the Superstar to Build Team Resilience

Occasionally, a team gets blessed with an extraordinary talent. This person is absolutely the best in the team - maybe one of the best in the domain - and inevitably the team gets configured around to make the most of this person's exceptional talents. However, an interesting phenomenon occurs when such a talent is the team for a prolonged period of time - it negatively impacts the performers of others in the team.

Three theories as to why:

• Tallest tree gets all the sunlight - the superstar eats up all the opportunities preventing other stars to emerge or even to develop. Imagine a scenario where your superstar developer just codes out the solution and everyone else just ends up deploying it. It limits skills development of other members of the team.
• 'Stephanie is going to take care of it', because Stephanie always does take care of it. It becomes overly routine for the superstar to solve all the problems, so other team members lose initiative, lose decision making (always deferring to Stephanie) capability and so also lose opportunity to grow and develop.
• No point in competing with Tiger Woods (!). When someone is obviously too good, you reduce your effort in order to shoot for a lower, more achievable outcome. The seminal study was Jennifer Brown, "Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars." which plotted the handicap of other elite performers when Tiger Woods was at his peak - they all progressively declined (even when not directly competing with Woods), only to uptick again when Woods was injured. Now this was in individual competition, but we can imagine similar effort reducing outcomes in a team setting where intra-team competition is a thing (i.e sales teams)

So what do we do about this?

The answer should be obvious to all - you get the superstar (temporarily) out of the team. Put them on a project, away from business as usual. Maybe we even loan them out to another team in the company. Performance will predictably dip in superstar Stephanie's absence, but if dormant talent will emerge with sufficient exposure and support to recover performance.

3. Engineer Shared Adversity To Accelerate Trust Relationships

Elite sports performers know that trust relationships are critical for securing competitive success. This is obviously true in team sports but also true in 'individual' sports, where the performer is always first to share credit with coach, trainer, nutritionist, psychologist and the rest. It's a team effort to put together elite performance, and if there wasn't absolute trust between those team members, then winning performance will struggle to emerge.

Most of us have built trust relationships simply through tenure - be around the same people long enough and you get to a point where you know each other in different circumstances. However, most of us in business will not have the time to rely on organic trust building in this way, so invest time in figuring out how to accelerate it. You might remember team lunches (do we still do these?) etc - these are all attempts at such acceleration.

Taking it a step further, sharing an emotionally intense experience is surefire accelerator of trust. It doesn't seem to matter whether the emotion was positive or negative, only that it happened, was intense and was shared by others who experienced the same thing, ideally at the same time and place.

These could be celebrations, like the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee in 2012 - 1 million people out on the streets, congregating around Buckingham Palace. It was an intense outburst of celebration - and community. I think winning the World Cup (obvs know nothing about it) will be like this, or hosting the Olympics like the Parisians are now. It doesn't have to be happy experience either - we all remember Covid-19 right? It was a scary situation but I remember feeling much better for the fact it was shared phenomenon - others were in the same boat, sharing the same privations, making the same decisions.

The question for managers in 2024 who want to secure elite team performance by increasing the quality of trust relationships in between team, is how to engineer such events so that shared emotional intensity can be the fuel to build team? Something other than 'lets work the weekend and get pizza'. Be interested to know whether anyone has any experience to share - let me know in comments if you do ??

4. Ritualise-to-Neutralise Potential Disruptive Returnee

Part of the reason why employers are bad at 'boomerang' hires might be that we're not quite sure how the former employee is going to 'fit in' with the team that they had once left. The team has not been in stasis in the period the returnee has been away, has likely evolved a structure without that person being part of it. How is the returnee going to 'fit in' - do they understand that the return will not be a time warp back to where they were when they left, that they will have to adapt to a new role?

This challenge seems to increase with the stature of the returnee. The more significant the past contribution, the greater the perceived challenge of reintegration. I wonder whether this might explain why significant past contributors in team sports are often seemingly 'exiled' even though if considered purely on their capabilities, they would be included in the team.

I recall a great talk by Kate Louise Richardson-Walsh, OBE, Team Captain and Gold Medal winner of the GB Field Hockey team, recalling exactly such an occasion, where a former star player was recalled to the team, causing some consternation in existing team which had felt well equipped to compete without this new / old team member. This is how the team dealt with it

• Recognise the team concern - humans are not modular units which can be swapped in / out without repercussions to performance. Critical for the leader to recognise this and communicate the reasoning to the incumbent team members.
• Communicate the new role to the incoming team member - no return to what was - it is indeed time to be unburdened by what has been. There is a new role, and a controlled reintegration into a designed structure.
• Agreed behaviours - required for all team members - how decisions are made, communicated, how conflicts are resolved.
• Ritualisation of the return - don't disguise the moment or pretend that it isn't a big deal. Make it a big deal, and have every incumbent member do something individually to welcome the incomer and accelerate the trust relationships

What you hope to have happen here is access to the known capability of the old star performer, but not disrupt the performance of others.

5. Calibrate Management to Career Trajectory

The world of Talent Acquisition is full of 'bad ideas, we're going to do anyway'. It's also full of great ideas, we don't do enough of. One of these is that you should hire for trajectory - where the candidate is going rather than where the person has been. Any recruitment agency whose ever hired a senior sales person only to have this person bomb out will know what I mean here - you can teach the how-to but not the want-to. That is not to say that experienced heads need to be abandoned; only that they require a different type of attention, a different type of motivation. There comes a point when we want to get off the career ladder, or least, don't want to climb up anymore. It makes no sense to keep the incentives the same when someone has reached this point in their career. Tenured leaders also need a different kind of management, especially as they are likely to subconsciously do 'just enough' rather than to the limit.

It was again Kate Louise Richardson-Walsh, OBE who talked about this, this time bravely volunteering her own example of a key performer who has going onto the final chapter of their career. In team gym work, Kate was actually called out by a junior member of the team for not doing enough on the weights - a shocking rebuke, even if it was delivered with empathy. The episode led to deep reflection, to the point that Kate realised that she was indeed slacking off, accepting the circumstances rather than pushing at the edges of possibility. It was her responsibility to others which led her to up her game for the final run of her storied career.

How does this apply to the business world? Manage by trajectory - make sure you understand where every team member is on their life and career journeys and apply the management techniques accordingly. Tenured old pro's who have a long history of consistent top performance - may need a different type of management when the end of the line is near.

Anyways, love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Need to get fit now, not for the Olympics but so I can get into my clothes again.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

What's in the News?

It's the end The Recruitment Flex ??

Sad news for the industry as Canadian recruitment legends Serge Boudreau and Shelley Billinghurst bring an end to their outstanding podcast, The Recruitment Flex. It was one of the best podcasts out there and an outstanding achievement to get to 350+ episodes. It was my great honour to appear in 1 or 2 of these! Follow both Serge and Shelley on their LinkedIn and see what else they might get up to in next chapter.

Bob Pulver is launching a new podcast Elevate Your AIQ

One door closes, another one opens. Check out Bob's new podcast, which focuses on Ethical AI. Love that members of the community are finding their own voice and on topics of specialism which are not well covered. Good luck with this Bob - look forward to listening to the shows.

BTW: do you have a recruitment or HR podcast you want to promote? Let me know!

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiter Events to Attend in 2024

Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 - updated folks. Coming back from Recfest, no question my enthusiasm for in-person events has only grown. Make sure you check out this spreadsheet - add any you think are missing - and get attending some of these amazing events. Btw, we might as well start adding 2025 events also, so get cracking with this also!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep266 - How to Hire a Chief People Officer, Fri 2nd Aug 2024, 2pm

Have you ever hired your own boss? Seems to me that this is what you have to do when you're hiring for a Chief People Officer. How does this happen, what techniques work, do we need to 'special case' approaches for this role? Exciting show for anyone who is curious about the strange. We're with Annie Jackson, Head of Talent Acquisition (Cleo), Simon Mullins, MD (ESIX), Lisa Scales, Talent Acquisition Director (Royal Mail), Jennifer Candee, Global TA Leader & Gaetan van Reusel, MD (Camario). Register here

Tech Demo Day, Thursday 8th August, 2pm AEDT

2024 is unexpectedly the year of tech purchasing, as TA teams look to consolidate their tech stack, so what better than to line up a bunch of tech providers and have them demo all in one day? Strivin' CEO Laura Johnson putting this event together, featuring an opening keynote from Chris Long, MD of Elev8. Free to register to have at it here.

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter,?comment below?with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

End Notes

I'm in London for the next 5 weeks and I couldn't be happier with this!

Traveling is great but for me a holiday is chill out on the couch in sunny Hoxton. Let me know if you're about in London this August and if you want connect - I'm still going to meet people, just not overseas for the time being!

Cheers

Hung

Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.