A good friend of mine went on P-Coy, the gruelling three-week selection test for airborne forces and the Parachute Regiment having done almost no preparatory training. He couldn’t because he had glandular fever; an unpleasant viral infection, which even once gone often leaves patients susceptible to post viral infection. Despite medical advice to the contrary he went on the course anyway.
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It rained every day – except the days when the rain turned to sleet. Winter in North-West Europe, the temperature always close to zero, a wet penetrating cold seeping into your core and pushing out the warmth.
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In the game of golf 'taking a mulligan' is a chance to repeat a shot. History records, perhaps apocryphally, that the phrase derives its origins from a player named David Mulligan, a Canadian player who was the manager at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York in the 1920's. He arrived late to a game with friends, hit a terrible tee shot but promptly re-took the shot, cheekily explaining he was making a correction. His friends named the practice after him and the name stuck.
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When it comes to critical, innovative or disruptive thinking, experience, a much-prized commodity in most hierarchies, is actually our Achilles heel, it gets in the way. Throughout my military career, especially outside the unique environment of Special Forces I was surprised and ultimately disillusioned by the Army’s inability to think and act creatively – trapped as it was by the weight of its own experience.
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Recently I was lucky enough to do some work with the Performance staff of one of team GB’s elite athlete programmes. One of the lessons that really struck me over the course of several days was the importance of anticipation in elite performance and its role in developing high performance teams.
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High performance in work place teams including the indivisible requirement for leadership is about development not training. This short post is about the difference between training and development and why it matters.
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Metris Leadership has recently been doing some work with a national retailer who places a high premium on their ability to innovate. They even have a President's prize, which gives a large financial incentive to anyone providing successful new ideas. But the truth is that the company actually isn’t very good at innovation and despite having the most engaged staff we have ever seen in a large business they are as flat footed as everyone else when it comes to innovation. Here is a quick analysis of why the culture around innovation is nearly always wrong and what you can do about it.
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It may not at first be obvious why humility should be taken as a prerequisite quality for effective leadership. It is a challenging concept for many of us bought up in a society that esteems and champions the role of the individual almost above all else. The word can have a tendency to be associated with weakness or a lack of assertiveness but really as C.S Lewis quipped, ‘humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less’.
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I have the great good fortune to be a parent and to have the experience of trying to raise two small boys. Every day brings its challenges and excitement – long days and short years, as one exhausted friend commented. Along the way I’ve probably learnt almost as much about leadership and teams from the experience of watching my sons grow up and trying to shape their characters as I did from a career in the military. This short blog looks at 4 things I learnt.
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High performance teams are defined by their ability to get results – consistently and against the odds. Lots of ambitious organisations and business aspire to create high performance teams because of the competitive advantage they generate – which translates directly to the bottom line!
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