INNERGISE!

With an exciting summer of sport ahead of us what parallels can we as business leaders learn from elite athletes?

Goals

Elite athletes don’t make it to the top by chance; it has come from careful planning and hitting numerous small goals to reach their long term goal. As a business leader you need to develop personal and business strategic plans with clear goals, developing and challenging you and your business but still keeping them realistic and attainable. Once you have reached your goal it is important to have other goals you are working towards as well as plans for reaching these goals, this may be a case of maintaining your position, to ensure momentum and direction isn’t lost.

Competition

Don’t insult your competitors; draw on the strengths of your product / service and not on the weakness of the competition. When you hear athletes interviewed after their wining performance you are likely to hear them say how tough the competition was and how talented the other competitors are, as well as how much harder the athlete / team were and focused on winning. Use this approach when talking about competition in your industry.

Mental attitude

The real hallmark of an elite athlete is their mental attitude, their ability to cope with high pressure environments, dealing with competition who may not be playing fairly, ability to come back stronger after a poor performance and above all, no matter what the scenario, maintaining belief in themselves and their ability.

There are many scenarios we encounter in our day that cause excessive pressure and demands to be placed on us, as leaders we must identify ways to cope with this to ensure business performance does not dip. We can afford to take a step back from the situation, where elite athletes might not be able to, to look at the big picture, delegate responsibilities to the most qualified person to allow you to focus on a particular area of the issue and identify ways to overcome this.

Maintaining belief in your performance as well as coming back stronger than ever will focus you and your team on working towards your goals. Ensure that you are learning from feedback and adapting where necessary so the belief in your performance is warranted and you can come back stronger.

Performance review

Athletes will review the strengths and weaknesses of any performance, working closely with their coaches and team they can analyse what worked and what could have been different. Even after a winning performance there is still al lot to learn, looking into the processes that went into your business success and feedback from your team and clients you can review the areas for improvement.

Not only is it important to review your performance, but to review the performance of your successful competitors. Identifying areas of weakness that exist in your competitors will allow you to maximise on this to improve your performance.

Winning

Winning is something that is great to experience, but you can’t expect it all the time. How you deal with those moments when you aren’t winning will determine your strength in the industry. When you experience a drop in sales or complaints, take it in your stride, fix the problems and move on, don’t dwell on it.

Praise your team and customers

After an excellent game where one individual in a team may have excelled, they don’t talk about how great their goals were, they talk about how great their team were for passing the ball and providing them with unwavering support.

As good as your product or service is, don’t lose sight of your team delivering and providing the product / service as well as your customers who act as your advocates and spread positive word of mouth. Showing appreciation for your team and customers will go a long way in demonstrating to your internal and external audiences your desire and passion for building a better business, thus in turn driving up team performance.

Enjoy the game and celebrate success

Take time to celebrate the successes you achieve with your team. Taking this time out to celebrate will remind you the hard work and commitment put into achieving the success was worthwhile and encourage the business to reach the next goal.

Perhaps the most important part of competing is to enjoy the game, without the enjoyment for what you do you lack the passion and drive to become better at it.