High Performance Culture Is Burning Your Leaders Out. Here’s What to Do Instead.

I see so many organisations who are wanting to improve performance who get an ex sports person turned “High Performance Team Expert” to come in and work with them. The normal approach is they tell everyone to turn it up to 11. High performance teams, performance culture, performance everything. And for about three months, it works. Everyone's got enthusiasm. We're gonna do all this new stuff, it's gonna change the game.

Then people go, actually, I'm exhausted already. I don't have any more to give.

And here's the thing that gets me about that whole high performance athletics analogy: it's just wrong, if you actually look at what athletes do.

Athletes don't go to the Olympics every day. The Olympics happens every four years. In the build up to that, they're competing in smaller events. Events that have a demand on them, sure, but they're also recovering. They're doing their nutrition. They're resting. That's what allows them to build toward the one moment that actually matters.

What do we do in most businesses? We go, it's the Olympics every day. All day. Let's go. And everybody's expected to win a gold medal every single time.

That's unsustainable. It's genuinely impossible for leaders to meet that expectation. But we've built a quarterly rhythm, quarterly budgets, quarterly P&Ls, that has everyone sprinting flat out, every single day, to get this quarter's result over the line.

I'm not saying that's ridiculous. We need to make money. We need bottom line results, obviously.

But would you actually compete better if you stepped back from the relentless competition vibe? If you focused on your nutrition, your rest, your technique, your training, instead of just sprinting constantly? Chapter 5 of my book talks all about Downtime and is the chapter a lot of people comment was the unusual inclusion.

We've done this three and a half thousand times now, roughly. And the answer is yes. Not being in competition mode all the time does yield better results. Consistently.

It's not really about working less. It's about shifting the perspective away from sprint all the time, toward what actually produces a good result on the day that matters.

If you're running your team like it's the Olympics every single day, you're creating a group of people who're going to be exhausted by month four and have nothing left by the time the result actually needs to show up. That’s why we have so many people who say things like “I just need to get through this week/month/quarter/until Christmas and then things will calm down - they won’t because the system isn't setup for it to do so.

Want to find out where the friction is building in your own team before it turns into exhaustion? The free assessment at jblhighperformance.com/assessment takes about five minutes and gives you a straight answer.