Let’s imagine, your playing Fantasy Football and you get the chance to design your ultimate dream team. Do you go for broke and pick 11 of the world’s greatest strikers? Of course not: your goal would be wide open. You need to field the right balance of players that excel in different positions – players that understand their strengths and can play together brilliantly.
Nothing stays static. Markets shift, customer expectations change and employee expectations evolve. If leaders want to continue to deliver high performance in the long term, then they have to be constantly checking their course and trimming their sales to stay on course. In an environment driven by short-term results, it takes discipline to step back and look at the bigger picture. The long-term rewards are well worth the effort.
We coach a number of leaders and leadership teams who want to see their organisations sustain a high level of performance. We encourage them to take time out on a regular basis, where we ask them some BIG questions. Doing this can make a huge difference to keeping things on track.
The questions aren’t complicated, but they do help leaders to focus on the really important things that they can do to help sustain performance in the long term:
It stands to reason that the happier and more engaged your workforce is the better the results they will deliver.
Achieving a high performance culture in your business will not happen by accident. It takes conscious effort to both create and maintain, but never fear, help is at hand.
Here are Wild Thinking’s 3 easy steps to get you going:
noun, Sociology
It is perhaps no surprise to discover that there is often quite a gap between perception and reality. Sometimes, simply making people aware of the gap can be the wake up call they need to make change. Read More
A new book, “Rethinking Positive Thinking” by Gabriel Oettingen, Professor of Psychology at New York University, helps shed light on the question of why commitments to action and change can sometimes result in little more than business as usual. Read More
Glaswegians’ team effort was a winner at the Games. The triumph of the Commonwealth Games this year in Glasgow was that it advanced from the position that local people should be involved and encouraged at every stage. During the fortnight you could hardly move in the city for banners reminding you that, “People make Glasgow”, printed The Sunday Times. Read More
There were two very contrasting World Cup football matches over the weekend. One was England’s 2-1 defeat at the hands of Italy and the other was Germany’s 4-0 win over Portugal. Despite the numerous differences in terms of style and substance, the key contrast between the two was evident by comments made during and after the game by pundits and managers.
England have set off to the World Cup with a new man in the team – Dr Steve Peters, the psychiatrist who has worked so successfully with British Cycling over recent years. It is great to see that they are committed to developing their mind game every bit as much as the physical game on the pitch. With “pressure of expectation” often cited as a reason for failure in many of England’s previous World Cup campaigns, maybe this is the edge that the team need to succeed. Read More
As I was thinking what next for Team Performance I decided to explore one of our favourite Wild Thinking philosophy’s that have inspired us in recent years. It seems fitting to explore a cycling success story with the imminent start of this years’ Tour de France in Yorkshire. Read More
Wild Thinking is asked to facilitate a lot of DWOP (Drilling the well on paper) sessions. These are technical sessions that also have a number of other exciting variants, including CWOPs (Completing the well on paper) and IWOPs (Intervening the well ….) etc. The basic idea is simple – you are about to embark on something that is technically very challenging, so before you start, it’s good to get everyone involved together and pull apart the plan to look for any cracks. Read More