Why Leadership is an Endurance Activity...

Endurance is a concept we don’t often talk about in leadership. Endurance is an important quality to have in leadership today as it creates new thinking and projects momentum over time. Our workforce is different from three years ago, it requires different responses and different thinking. I was working with a leader recently and we were talking about endurance particularly because she is training for a 50km race, now that takes endurance! We talked about what it takes to have endurance to meet her objectives and how she will achieve success. It is the same in leadership. Without endurance momentum cannot succeed.

Leaders today often try to motivate teams and because motivation has to come from within, endurance is needed to help understand how they drive their own motivation. When leaders understand the concept of momentum maintenance, energy is conserved, and productivity remains for the longer term. When motivation is reduced due to the busy nature of our roles or during high stress periods, our brain registers it needs to conserve energy therefore endurance is impacted. When leaders use endurance as a principles of their leadership framework, staff can stay focused, on track and self-motivate. Having the attentional intelligence to know how to move in the rhythm of interval work patterns definitely creates endurance over time.

Some principles by which to lead with endurance.

1.?????Develop your workforce based on interval work patterns. Show your team how to use mind based self-leadership across all roles where all staff schedule their work day and work week based on their endurance. Using this principle will definitely help staff to understand using their diaries more effectively takes them into more productive work patterns.

2.?????Understand what happens to our brain and brain waves when motivation is reduced. If endurance is reduced, motivation is impacted. If motivation is reduced, endurance is hard to achieve. Our brain looks for patterns constantly and has between 60,000- 70,000 thoughts a day so this principle is crucial for better performance. Once we know what patterns our brains are looking for, we can muscle up different brain waves therefore endurance can increase.

3.?????Trauma responsive organisation. This principle is crucial as many workplaces do not work on trauma responsive systems. For example if staff do not understand how to chunk their time effectively, work in interval work patterns, have adequate resources and systems to be effective in their roles, endurance is impacted. Everything from scheduling, using systems effectively, ensuring workloads are not too high all contribute to motivation so really understanding what a trauma responsive organisation is helps to create endurance across teams.

4.?????Understand the concept of time. Something we never have enough of, don’t value adequately or understand how to use it well. Knowing what we spend time on and how to buy it back, directly impacts motivation and endurance. Time is about value, so consider how you help your team value time. If you have meetings for 60 minutes, reduce them to 50 minutes, save 10 minutes. Most leaders are in meetings for nearly 2 days a week, reducing to 1.5 days a week can assist to buy back time.

Tracey Harris I CEO Amovita International & MyBio.life

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