How managers can achieve sustainable performance at work

Lee: Fulfilment, purpose, vision, value, financial, social, etcetera. So we need it. So as soon as we understand that and it's part of life, this whole idea about work-life balance looks a lot easier and we can work on how do we integrate it into our our life basically better.
Jimmy: Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader, the podcast for leaders working in complex challenging environments to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out and to help you build a high-performance culture in your team. I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes. And if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device.
Hello, and welcome back to this week's episode. I am really excited to introduce this week's guest, Lee Eldridge. Lee is the founder and performance director of Cognitive Athlete. He's got more than 23 years of experience in coaching and mentoring senior business leaders, professional athletes, and teams across organisations to optimise their output. He's worked with some incredible businesses and teams, such as the Welsh hockey team, Fulham Football Club, and Watford Football Club amongst many, many others. Lee, welcome to the show. How are you?
Lee: Yep, I'm good, thank you. Thanks for having me. Pleasure.
Jimmy: Excellent. It was great to have you on the show, and I know we're going to have an interesting conversation today about the idea of work-life balance. And this is something that potentially is a hot topic right now as people are feeling the phenomenon of burn-out and overwork, and how do I squeeze it all in. Just for those people who maybe are thinking, what does work-life balance mean to everybody else, I have my own interpretation, but what does it mean to everybody else? How do you see work-life balance?
Lee: So, I think that it is not necessarily a myth, but definitely a narrative that to a lot of us we really struggle with. And there's two main reasons why I think that. One is it's very hard to balance something where the sides are always changing in terms of importance or weighting. Instead of just a normal set of scales where you put X weight here, X weight there. Secondly of all, we might get this balance and then the next day we lose it. And we're in this perpetual cycle of trying to get balance, lose it, get balance, lose it, get balance, lose it. So for me it's I like the idea of it. I like this idea that we need to be in search of what I would say better integration in what we do. But for me, I believe that work is just part of life. We can't separate the two basically. So a lot of the work I do is try to talk around people in terms of like right, okay, you know, with your work, is it where you want to be going? Where do you see, feel, and hear yourself in in five or 10 years or so? And ultimately, what you do, does it tick your value boxes? And, you know, the big pic- one question that people or the one thing that people are talking about is purpose, and it- do you have a purpose, etcetera? So that for me is it in a nutshell from a from a work-life balance point of view.
Jimmy: Hm. And why do you think it's so hard for people to get their head around these two different phenomenons? As you say, it is an integration. But why do you think people do want to delineate work and life, and why is it such a struggle for them to do that in the modern context?
Lee: So, I think that probably even maybe 20 years ago, but definitely 30, 40 years ago, we seemed to have a clear work-life balance, because we'd leave the office at 5:00 or factory or shop or wherever we were doing and that was it. We'd come home, life would start. Even if people wanted to get in contact with us, they couldn't. But, you know, since the dawn of 2007 with the Apple iPhone or whatever whenever that was, you know, the old-style BlackBerries, we are connectable 24/7. People can get hold of us. And if people can get hold of us, it becomes a lot tougher for us to really switch off and be able to just walk away from the office. So, a- you know, a prime example is some of the the business leaders that I work with is we try to put in a commute. Like a false commute, even if you're working from home, you get out, you go and walk for 15 minutes. Lots of people were like, "Oh yeah, look, I'm working from home, I can save time, and don't need to travel." But actually that commute time was a great opportunity to ultimately de-stress, think about what's happened in the day so that you could walk through the door and, you know, not react to things that come from, you know, at you and you react in a bad way, because of the amount of stress you've been under during the course of the day. So I think that's where the challenge has come from in terms of we feel this need that we should be kind of connected to people as much as possible.
Jimmy: It's super interesting the idea of the BlackBerry being the thing that's got in the way of work-life balance. And obviously, you know, smartphones in general. But that always being connected, that existed before, you know, for a- for a number of years before COVID kicked in. But COVID seems to have been almost like the thing that's tipped us over the edge, isn't it, with the work-life balance issue that people seem to be facing. What do you think it was, yes, stealing their commute, but why do you think leaders have suddenly found that they're feeling even more pressure and even less able to deal with work-life balance than prior to COVID?
Lee: So, you know, I moved into- I left professional sport probably around 2016, moved into corporate and we were talking about, you know, this idea of life integration, this idea of, you know, making sure that we had balance, or making sure that we were doing things to support us as a human being. And what happened was COVID came along and it just exponentially speeded up the growth of this discussion. We've gone from people turn around saying, "Right, no, you have to be in the office, you have to be in the wo- office. It will never work. It will never work." And then within six months, COVID hits and everyone's working from home, you know, up and running. It really interesting to work with some, you know, finance people and traders, and how quickly they were able to pivot from, you know, trading on a floor to being able to get all their equipment out to their traders and going from that, you know, whereas previously, never happened. And what has come with COVID is that all the work I've done, you know, we've got some companies or some industries that have thrived in COVID. You know, they've done really well. You know, they've been the busiest that they've ever been. We've then had other industries that have really struggled, you know, people have lost their jobs, they've had to pivot, etcetera. So even hugely positive and hugely negative comes with huge amounts of stress and strain. And that this whole idea of being more productive, being more productive, milking ourselves for as much as possible, it's good, but it's not sustainable. You know, so if I we talk about it from a professional athlete point of view, our goal or my goal as a coach is to give you enough stimulus to create a stress so that then your body will recover and you should in theory, you know, we call it the General Adaptation Syndrome, you should come back a little bit stronger than you were before. The problem is if I step over the line, I give you too much stress, this can lead to injury or this can lead to what we would call underperformance. So we're always navigating this tight line. And it's easier to a certain degree in professional sports for me to get that data back from you and be like, "Right, okay, you're not responding or the signs." So look, we'll make training a bit easier for the next couple of days, we'll get some data, we'll see where we go from there. Business is a little bit different, because you can't turn around to your boss and say, "I'm going to have the next two days off, I'm really tired." But what we can do is that you can start to do two things. One is start to collect some data on yourself. You know, we all have access to wearables. The data can be a little bit iffy, but there are some really good, good things that you can take out of data or out of wearables. And next, really kind of get in touch with yourself and say, "Right, okay, how am I ultimately feeling?" Because it's very easy to grind and hustle and just go again, just go again. But if I remove you from a company or if you can't do your job or burn out, and it is a real thing, you know, there are some serious symptoms of burn-out, you are not going to be productive. You are not going to be able to contribute to your job. You're not going to be able to contribute to your business. And probably also if we think of life, you're going to struggle to be a dad, a mum, a wife, a husband, a brother, a sister, whatever your role is in outside of work. I think that's really the big area of why it's happened or why it's come on to the discussion point for every company in their health and well-being department or their learning and development or their HR.
Jimmy: Yeah, I'm completely, 100% aligned with you when it comes to the need to And we think about it in terms of the peak performance equation, so stress plus rest equals growth. And we talk about it in our body of work around the necessity for down-time. One of the big push backs we get, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this and whether you've seen this as an example in your consulting work, is, "Well, I don't have time to take downtime," or, "I'm too busy to take downtime and rest," or, "If I take some time off, I'm going to fall behind my competitors." How do you broach that kind of argument or resistance with your clients? Have you got an example of where you've actually seen a benefit from having some downtime added to their agenda?
Lee: So, yeah, the key around that is obviously from a if we look at it from a company point of view, is to really get hold of the senior leaders and have a discussion with them and say, "Look, these are the benefits." And to get those leaders to understand and to try it themselves and to basically say, "Right, okay, look, it's okay for me to step out of the office for 15 minutes to go for a walk, or to take a longer a lunch break to go to the gym so I don't have to go at 6:00 4:00 in the morning or 8:00 at night so I can spend some time with my family or friends or whatever it might be. And just try it and just see what happens." And there's a huge fear factor that's driven this have to be on, have to be working, have to be hustling. But what I try to say to people is like, let's really look at not only the quantity of work that you're doing, but the the quality of work. Because ultimately, we can Sometimes we're really judged. People say, "Oh, we're judged on the the quantity of work, how much work you can do." But ultimately, people don't want lots of work done poorly. What they want is high levels of work. And if we look at the way AI is going and where things are going, from a human being point of view, our kind of super skills is really our ability to problem-solve very complex problems and create solutions. And we can't do that from a point of fatigue. It just doesn't happen. We make bad decisions when we're tired. We make bad decisions when we're overstressed. Stress is a big area that I talk to people is like stress has had a hugely negative connotation, "Oh my God, I'm stressed. I'm stressed, I'm stressed." But we need stress. You and I wouldn't be here today recording this or whatever jobs we've done or whatever we've achieved without stress in the system. Because it helps us to release energy, it helps us to focus, it helps us to kind of concentrate and think laterally. But too much stress, it's over the end. So I say to people, "All right. You can push, you can work, you can go, you can go. But if we go that way, you're really kind of spinning your wheels, and you're not going to be performing not only to your highest, but sustainable." You know, we I worked in professional rugby where, you know, the career span is probably from the age of 18, 19 up to 34, 35 if you're lucky if you're injury free, so quite a short period of time. So we're trying to suck milk you and get as much out of your performance. But we step back in business or life in general, it's a long-term marathon event really where, actually, sometimes pacing yourself might be the best thing. So I speak to a lot of business founders or business owners and I'm like, "Right, well, if you went a little bit slower, okay, it maybe that your business gets to where it wants to in a year more down the line or two years down the line, but you'll be in a healthier position. You know, you'll report form better, you'll have better relationships everywhere you go, and it's just a better overall picture."
Jimmy: Hey, Jimmy here. Just wanted to drop in to this episode and let you know that we're so grateful for all those reviews that you as listeners leave on our podcast. We put our hearts and souls into the podcast and the guests we invite are absolutely fantastic. I wanted to share one review with you from a recent episode from Kelly, "Jimmy's experience and thoughtful dialogue provide a phenomenal canvas of learning opportunities from thought leaders in the industry. It was a pleasure both listening and participating. What a great resource to learn valuable tips and tricks to navigating impactful leadership capabilities." So, not only are we thrilled to have incredible guests on the show, but we're also absolutely overjoyed that it's having a positive impact on our listeners like you on the Ways of Working podcast. Speak soon.
Yeah, I'm thinking in terms of one of the common miscomprehensions of the high performance sport model that's translated into business where people believe that high performance sports people are performing all the time, and so we need to perform all the time in business. And so they're thinking about that high performance concept as constantly being go go go. And in reality you'll know- you'll be able to talk to this far better than I will. In a high-performance sports environment like a professional rugby team or a professional soccer team, they're playing a couple of matches a week, maybe one match a week, and the rest of the week is preparing to perform. And so some of the success we've had with clients is around reframing that down-time as preparation to perform time. So when it's game day, when it's that important crucial meeting, when it's that other thing that they really need to step up for, they're able to perform for that, not feeling like they're in the game of their life 12 hours a day every single day. And I think that's, you know, it's an important concept to get into your head that professional athletes and Olympic sprinters and whatever, they're only doing one or two things a week, not all day every day. And it's not sustainable to keep going all day every day for you or your team, right?
Lee: Yeah. And well, wouldn't say the greatest studies out there, but if you look at especially endurance event athletes, you know, when we talk about intensity of levels, a vast, vast level or amount of training they'll do is in lower zones or what we call Zone 2 training, or building that aerobic base. And there'll be a really short, highly tiny percentage of what we would call high-intensity VO2 max push, push, push drive work. And people like, "Well, that doesn't make sense." But sometimes to go really fast, you need to do lots of stuff at a low level and and be able to change gear or change, you know, cognitive intensities when the time comes. And to try and get that message across in businesses is always the challenge, because they're like, "Look, we've got stakeholders, we've got board people, we've got senior leaders. Got to go, go, go, go, go." And I get it. I understand it. You know, we are we're all trying to achieve whatever we want to achieve. But if you look at a company, some of the companies that I've been in, you think, "Well, that's a house of cards." Not necessarily in terms of the company, but if that one person leaves, the workload that they've not being able to do will just ultimately get spread down the chain. And then more people- and then it's like, "Oh my word," off we go. And we know it takes a good nine to 12 months to find the right person, to get them into place, to get them up to speed. So from a work-life or work-integration point of view or life-integration point of view, it's where senior leaders need to probably get not in touch more, but have a bit more of awareness of, "Hey, can I spot signs of this person's really struggling?" And say to them, "Look, you know, I know you're doing a great job, I know you're working really hard. I'm not going to give you this next big project just because I want you to finish this one or I want you to get back on track. You will have another project." Because that's ultimately the big challenge, isn't it? People are like, "Oh, if I miss this project, I'm not going to get the promotion. I'm not going to earn what I need to earn, or I'm not going to develop my career as fast as I want to." But if you burn out, you're never going to get anywhere in your career anyway. And it's it's interesting that the amount of people I know that burn out and then they burn out again and you're like, "What? You surely that you would have seen the signs." And they don't see the signs. They just head down and keep going.
Jimmy: Yeah, I think you've hit on something really, really interesting and pertinent here, is that work-life balance is a personal responsibility. Work-life integration is a personal responsibility, but equally, it's a responsibility of the leadership of the organisation to work out who is not successfully integrating work and life, and who might need a little bit of support right now, which comes down to really knowing your people, doesn't it? It comes down to understanding where they're at, what what else is going on in their life, what else is going on in their job, and what support they might be needing right now. And people's performance can go up and down depending on what else is going on in their life, of course.
Lee: Yeah, so I think a big area that I talk about is not just leadership, but self-leadership, how you lead yourself. You know, the big five foundations or of health and wellness, you know, move, sleep, eat, breathe, think, they're really the big five in the simplest terms. They can be blown out of, you know, made really complex and people get really nerdy about them, but really they're the big five. And as a leader, and we're all leaders, whatever however whatever level you are in a company, you are a leader whether it's at home or, you know, at work. How you lead yourself has a huge reflection on the people around you. And when we talk about leadership, you know, we're talking about, you know, your emotional intelligence, your self-awareness, your emotional regulation. And that's a huge part of life. And, you know, we can be you know, some of the clients that I work with, you know, they can be very, very top top performers in their work, their business, but then at home they're really struggling to connect with their kids or to have a good relationship with their wife, or to get out and do any exercise, whatever it might be. And that's they might be seen as great leaders in that business, but at home they're not. So it's not for me is like, right, we have to look at everything as a holistic, you know, as a whole. Right, what is your performance? And I talk about performance as a a broad term how well you're talking. So you know, whenever I start coaching session or whatever, I just say, "Look, how's your performance out of a scale of 1 to 10 on everything? You know, dad, wife, husband, kid, whatever it might be, CEO, line manager, bla-bla-bla." And just get people to say, "Right, okay, actually, yeah, how have I been?" Because it's very easy to think, "Right, yeah, I'm I'm nailing it, I'm nailing it at nine or eight." But at home things are not going so well, basically.
Jimmy: I like that idea of performance being a holistic concept, and I think this goes back to your idea of work-life integration and realistically, what you do is work-life-performance integration, isn't it? So who are the clients that you really like to work with, and what do you look for in a potential client?
Lee: That's a, you know, great question. So, and I will get individuals come to me who are like, "Right, okay, yeah." And either that things are not going that well at home, or that well in the office, or, you know, they're really looking for kind of a broad, holistic performance point of view. But then I'll also step in and work within teams, within companies basically where they're like, "Right, okay, we understand that well-being is an important part, but how I try to voice that or go in and speak to companies is it's a huge part of performance. You know, well-being and performance are essentially the same coin, but just have two different faces. You know, if you don't have well-being sorted, you you can't have performance. But ultimately, what people don't understand is if you if you have performance If you don't have performance, you won't have well-being. Because one of the biggest driver when we, you know, look at Daniel Pink and motivational work, you know, mastery is up there in terms of what we want to be doing. And it feels really good to be performing well at work. There's a huge sense of fulfilment and purpose and drive, and all the good things that come about that. And that for me, from a company perspective, is way is a quite a "All right, okay, I get that. We need that support." Whereas sometimes with well-being, it's like, "Right, let's just tick a box. Let's just do a workshop or let's put some fruit in the office, or, you know, however that might look." So in terms of the ideal companies that I work with is I don't work that intensively with big, big organisation. I might go in and present on a key some thought-leader stuff. Really, my companies are probably 50 to 100 people whereby we're looking to really offer a service where N equals one, which basically means it is a overall program, but individualized to those people. And that's very similar how we would work in a professional sports environment, you know. Let's say that we're in the gym with a a rugby squad, so we might have 20 people in the gym. You know, it could be quite an intense looks very hectic, you know, looks like it's mental from the outside of people looking in, and the overall theme would be the same. Right, we are doing this, you know, this is what the the aim of the session is, but everyone would then split off and do their own individual things because of the way they move or the injuries they've had or bla-bla-bla, whatever it might be. So that is very similar to the way we do, is like, right, okay, let's say, for example, well-being, right, we know the big five. But, for example, you know, I've got two youngish children, my sleep pattern is not great. You know, you're going to start to appreciate that in some time and, you know, in a in a short period of time. So it's great for me to stand up and say, "Right, everyone, you need seven to nine hours. You need to, you know, get great sleep cycles, da-da-da." And you know, the hands will always come up and they'll say, "Right, yeah, but hold on. I've got a 12-month-old baby that wakes up three times a night, da-da. What can I do around that?" And so then, "Right, okay, look, we'll have a conversation about young parents or whatever it might be." You know, or and we'll work on that. That's where it's really good for companies, because then the employee or the people or the staff or whatever you want to term them think, "Oh right, okay, actually somebody in this company cares about me. I'm not just a number, I'm not just a tick-box. Actually, somebody's got my back."
Jimmy: I like that idea of your client interactions being mass market personalisation. We do something very similar. It's the, yes, we have a body of knowledge and some IP that is best practices, but you're an individual and you're an individual team, and each team is made up of individual people. So we need to tailor specifically to your needs to give you the performance lift or gain that you need. So fascinating, Lee. And if people wanted to get in touch with you, reach out, and have a further conversation, how would they do that?
Lee: Yep, so I'm quite I wouldn't say I'm big on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is the main place where I hang out from a social point of view. So just search my name, Lee Eldridge, or drop me an email at [email protected]. Always happy to chat. And, you know, if we went back to that mass market individualisation, it's great to talk to people, because everybody's slightly different and how we work out different things and put that Lego pieces together is is quite an exciting thing to do.
Jimmy: Yeah, and I think your experience in professional sports and now applying that into the corporate world will be a really, really good connection point for some of our listeners who are interested in how do I get peak performance in a way I might not have thought of previously. Lee, if you were to offer a sound bite in a nutshell of everything we've spoken about today that you'd like our audience to take away, what would that be?
Lee: That's a great question. And I would say out of all that we've talked about on on this particular topic, the sooner people move away from this idea of work-life balance and realise that work is part of life and it brings you so much in terms of um, you know, fulfilment, purpose, vision, value, financial, social, etcetera. So we need it. So as soon as we understand that and it's part of life, this whole idea about work-life balance looks a lot easier and we can work on how do we integrate it into our our life basically better.
Jimmy: Brilliant. Lee Eldridge, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your professional experience in the world of high-performance sports, that transition into corporate culture, and how you are teaching senior leaders to integrate work with life to gain better performance. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
Lee: Thank you so much for having me.
Jimmy: That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it and it helps us to connect with new listeners. Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest bestseller, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance. It's the leader's playbook for building a high performance culture, and it's packed with practical action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.