Inside Out Culture

Is a consistently healthy high performance culture possible?

• Inside Out Culture • Season 1 • Episode 10

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On this episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast we talk about high performance cultures. Much desired by leaders, managers and coaches, the term ‘high performance’ has been used in the past as an excuse to bully and harass team members into achieving unachievable targets or to push people beyond what their mental health is capable of handling.

Yet, when done well these environments are just fantastic to work in.

We talk in detail about what ‘high performance’ actually means - particularly in relation to winning - and talk through how to achieve it in a way that safeguards the mental and physical health of those on the team yet still leads to success.

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Join us as we reveal strategies to close the gap and craft a workplace where values are not just spoken, but lived and breathed, paving the way for a more authentic and engaging organisational culture.

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Colin:

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast, where we look at insides of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside. I'm Colin Ellis and I'm Cath.

Cath:

Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organization, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.

Colin:

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think.

Cath:

Hello and welcome to the Inside Out Culture podcast. I'm Cath Bishop.

Colin:

And I'm Colin Ellis, and on today's episode we are asking the question is a consistently high performance positive culture possible? Question is a consistently high-performance positive culture possible? Now, I'd love it, Cath, if the short answer is just like yes, but obviously that wouldn't be a very good podcast. People would just be switching off and going oh well, I got what I needed from that. So let's start with you, right, as a high-performance athlete, someone who's worked a lot in this environment.

Cath:

So do you want to give us a little bit of a background, a little bit of an explainer about what is this thing called high performance culture. Well, it's a good place to start, isn't it? Because actually it isn't one thing and it's a question that people ask me quite a lot as an Olympian. So tell me, what does a high performance culture look like in sport? And I competed at three Olympic games and I can tell you that each of the Olympiads, which had a different coach, different values, different approach, they had, each of them, a different high performance culture. Some of them were more effective in terms of our results, some of them were very different in terms of our experience. They would all loosely be called high performance cultures because we were pursuing excellence, because we were working really, really hard, training three times a day, pretty much seven days a week, but actually I'm not sure that any of them were really healthy high performance cultures and this is a bit of a question at the moment that I think we're grappling with in sport, we're grappling with in business Can we have a healthy high performance culture?

Cath:

Is that an oxymoron, is that an impossibility, and how do we do it? Because I'm not sure that's actually been something we were aiming for, you know, 20, 30 years ago and certainly before that. So in a way it's a question of our times, it's a new question, it's part of evolution of thinking. You know, how do we get better? And actually culture matters and potentially the positivity of the culture has an impact, and we also start to think of perhaps the longer term impact of what happens. It's no longer okay to abuse an athlete on the way to a medal. Well, not in most societies nowadays, do you think?

Colin:

Cath that we've made. I read this really good book recently called the Long Win, by you. Do you think high performance is seen as this is the only way that we can achieve what we need to achieve? Do you think it's kind of you? You said simple, narrow definitions of what winning means can lead to serious unforeseen consequences, and I often think with with high performance, the view is in people's head right, we need that to be able to win. In whatever context winning means. Do you think it's too simplistic to go right? High performance is the is the pathway, and that let's get that.

Cath:

Let's do that yeah, I think we've totally over simplified it and actually then started to use this label of high performance culture to excuse things. So when poor behavior happens, there's a sense of, oh well, that's what's required in order to get high performance. High performance is tough. Therefore, anything goes, and I think we see this has been abused in the sports world, but equally in the business world, and I think you can sort of trace back to some of that Wall Street culture, thinking of Gordon Gekko and Michael Douglas in that film in the 80s. That sort of really, you know, showed and displayed this culture of greed is good and more is better and it doesn't matter whatever it takes.

Cath:

I always think there's a lot of this language that is associated with high performance culture You've got to be all in, you've got to do whatever it takes.

Cath:

That I now see as really quite sinister, because actually that's sort of you giving up a sense of values, a sense of having some boundaries on what behaviors are acceptable or not acceptable, and thinking about the approach, being very deliberate about how we approach things. So, you know, thinking about the cost of winning what is acceptable on the way to winning an Olympic medal and what isn't. So training a vast amount of hours. Yeah, that's acceptable, although we don't want to cause kind of you know, terrible injuries or be training on injuries, abusing athletes, demeaning them, you know, kind of destroying their identity, associating them, valuing them only in so far as they can make a boat go fast or run really fast or throw really fast.

Cath:

Actually, that could be doing long-term damage, probably isn't going to help the performance either. So I think we need to start having these conversations about the cultural costs and therefore we can start to say, well, I think we can to start having these conversations about the cultural costs and therefore we can start to say, well, I think we can improve this high performance culture. It isn't a solid thing. That has to look a certain way, and that's where we're getting to with the need to create competitive advantage. We're starting to go well. Actually, there are some things in our culture that aren't actually helping us, and I think you'll have seen lots of those sorts of things in a business context.

Colin:

Yeah, you know I was reflecting on preparing for the show. Where did I first become aware of this concept or this phrase of high performance? And it goes back quite a way, actually, so far, in fact. I'm amazed I remember it, but it comes back to Tuchman's team performance model and this was kind of something from the mid-60s and lots of people listening to podcasts will certainly recognize it Forming, storming, norming, performing right. And I remember distinctly doing a team workshop and we're in the forming phase and day two, we're in the storming phase and it's up to us then to take this and get to the norming phase. And it's very, very specific. For those of you who are familiar with it, we'll put a link in the action sheet to Tuchman's team performance model, but it's a very kind of definitive graph that shows this is where you start and it goes down and then it goes up.

Colin:

And I, you know, when I reflected back, I thought did we ever get to the point where we were performing? Can it? Yes, but intermittently. And that's still my assessment, particularly when I'm working with teams in the business world, is that very few of them ever get to the point where they're norming. And so then when I'm speaking to senior leaders, they're like oh, we want a high performance culture. I was like great, tell me about where you're at right now. When I talk to them, most of them are still in the storm, in a norming phase. They haven't even got to performing. And so when I ask them, what outcomes are you looking for? It's like oh, high performance results. I'm like well, my goal is to help you get to results without talking about high performance.

Colin:

Because when employees and having been one, when we hear senior leaders say we want a high performance culture, it feels like a stick. It feels like here's something that we're going to whip you with until we get to a point where we feel that we're achieving results in the way that we want to do. And you mentioned there is a real compromise of the culture and I still, there's a real focus sometimes on let's get this done in the short term and almost, you know, forget about what's going to happen medium to long term to the culture. Let's make it all about that. So when I reflected back, I was like, yeah, using that model, I think for many organizations, for many teams, the immediate, short-term goal is how do we get to a place where we build a culture where we understand each other's strengths, where we can help each other, when we can recognize when we're not being ourselves, where we agree a set of behaviors, where we talk about what it means to collaborate meaningfully on a day-to-day basis.

Colin:

Let's get there first. Let's do that. Where people have a sense of agency over what they do, they are intrinsically motivated, and that then becomes the foundation for whatever comes next.

Cath:

Yeah, I think it's actually quite good advice to almost get rid of this high performance language, because it can be a mask, it can be sort of yeah, an excuse. Nobody quite knows what it really means. So if we are using that language, we need to say what does this actually look like? And also, though, to see it as a process. It's not a sort of solid thing. Today we have it, or we announced that this is the basis of a high performance culture. Oh, we've all got it now, and that's one of the things that Tuckman does is he at least provides a sense of this is going to take time, there's an evolution, and in fact, his sort of later thoughts were right. You go back around to the beginning again when somebody new comes or when something changes in the context, and so we're starting to think of things in that ongoing way rather than, yeah, you know, next month, high performance means these KPIs and basically do whatever it takes at all costs to hit those numbers. You know that is not any way a sustainable, healthy culture that does that.

Cath:

When I was thinking about this and trying to, yeah, again, like you, take a step back ahead of this conversation, I was thinking where does this really go back to? And you know, I guess, if we think super long term, then you know where do the habits of the business world come from? Perhaps from a military world, from a very brutal binary, win-lose on the battlefield world where there wasn't a lot of care going on, there wasn't a lot of psychological safety in the sort of Prussian wars, of whatever it was two centuries ago, and then I guess also just the beginning of the industrial revolution and the fact that we started to then sort of overemphasize these processes of optimizing, of standardizing, of efficiency. And the American I think he was an engineer, frederick Winslow Taylor. So we talk about Taylorism as being the beginning of these quite brutal cultures where we don't care about the people, we just want to improve and standardize and create more efficient processes. And that's actually language that lingers a century after.

Cath:

I mean, one of the issues in the pandemic was we've driven our National Health Service to, with an inch of being ultimately efficient, that we could no longer have any contingencies or space or reserves that we'd invested in. So this drive for efficiency has been sort of the language of the last century or so. That again has completely dehumanized our organizations. Arguably it hasn't really driven performance in terms of the numbers either, not over the long term.

Cath:

We now perhaps see the costs of that, and so, in a way, I think we're in a slow process of waking up to that and starting to re-humanize our organizations again, thinking about what's required to do that. How do we get out of some of the language of you know, bottom line is what matters. You don't want excuses, don't want us to go soft, we've got to deliver. How do we sort of enable that to be compatible with looking after our people, who are, after all, our biggest assets in the organization, and their health must be connected to what we actually produce and deliver as a company? How do we start to tally those things together?

Colin:

And everyone will have a different view and opinion on what high performance means for them, and regular listeners of the show will know I like to be relatively basic about these things. I was working with a blue collar team and we were talking about high performance and this guy was he was on shifts and he drives his van out and he goes and fixes things and he said he's like. He said I hear this all the time from our leaders high performance, high performance. He was like when do we get to the point where I have enough time in my day to just finish the jobs that I've got on the books without having to work overtime? I was like you know, that for me feels like high performance. I was like, well, yeah, it does, because you're actually doing what you said that you would do, in a way where you, I said, because it's clear that it's something that you've thought about, it's clear that it's something that it's kind of eating you up a little bit. You're not able to do these things.

Colin:

And I remember I met with the senior leadership team afterwards because what we'd done is we'd agreed you know kind of what the culture would be. We hadn't really talked necessarily about high performance. It's language. I like to keep out of workshops because I feel like it derails a little bit. And I said to the leadership team I was like you need to focus less on talking about high performance and more on creating the conditions where good people can actually just get their jobs done. I haven't met an employee yet that doesn't want to get up in the morning, do what they need to do and then clock off at a time where they're like I've had a good day, I've done what I need to do, I'm on top of it, I've worked well with other people, my interactions have been good, I've been a good human being and I've contributed. You know that's pretty much what every employee wants to do, but with this relentless push towards high performance, it's possible to do that without talking about it and really create this sense of positivity.

Colin:

I think you know, often I'll hear Cath is like oh, we need, we need people to be positive and they'll throw in things. Like you know carol dweck's work on mindset, it's like oh, you know, what we want is a growth mindset. We need everyone to have a growth mindset. And when you're telling people to have a growth mindset, when you're telling them to be positive. It generally generates feelings that are the opposite of that, like, oh, here we go again. How about we have one less meeting and give me the time to do what I need to get done today? That would be a start I love that.

Cath:

I think what you're doing is calling out the uh, yeah, the high performance bullshit. If we're allowed to say that, and I think it's important, I actually find myself thinking the same are we as coaches and consultants, should we stop using this language because it obfuscates really. You know exactly the core of what matters good people doing good work, um, being recognized for that, not being kind of pushed with an inch of their life and their health as a result of that. I read a book recently that was published a couple of months ago by sort of a sports psych actually who's friends with a sports psych, I know and it's called the Work Revolution by Jonathan Males, and he talks about performance and leadership in the modern world, and I'm just going to read like a paragraph from it because I think it really sums up some of the issues and I love it. It's got lots of practical kind of ideas and thoughts in it and actually the paragraph is titled the Way we Work is, shall we say, not in good shape, but it's a word that starts with S.

Cath:

I begin with a deliberately provocative picture of the world of work, because for many people, people being at work is often stressful and, at worst, toxic. This is a natural consequence of pursuing endless growth, which has been a distinctly mixed blessing. So this concept of growth is also a big issue in our society, isn't it? At the moment, many of us are better off than ever before, but this has come at great cost to society in the natural world. Fortunately, we're not powerless and we can each play a role in creating more meaningful ways of doing business. I call this healthy high performance, because well-being and performance at work can be complementary, not mutually exclusive. And for me that really starts to kind of give us the challenge of let's, for the next century, be exploring in this space. But it really means challenging some norms, some assumptions, the language of growth and KPIs and performance and absolutely the way we behave around that. So I think there are some good provocations out there and a sense of how we do things differently and in my sporting work.

Cath:

So I have a role supporting or challenging, scrutinizing British gymnastics to kind of really make sure that they are effective, deeply long-term effective in creating culture change in a sport where a shocking number of young, young athletes suffered, were abused, and you know it's so important that care is at the heart of what they do. But there was a system where care just wasn't really present. So you've almost got to completely reinvent the system in order to do that and that requires a tremendous commitment from the leadership and actually deep systemic change. That doesn't come overnight, even if you want to do it. You have to sort of unpick the ways of working, the metrics, the assumptions about what success looks like, the counting, the medals and the number of members we have and the sort of purely commercial numbers. So it is a big challenge to do things differently.

Cath:

But the good thing is we have organizations in the business world and the sports world where we actually see we have to move in this direction, we can move in this direction. And it's exciting because we start to open up the possibility of having a positive social impact beyond the growth numbers and the profit margins of the next quarter. We start to think about what do those numbers mean? What is that impact we have on others? And for me that's sort of part of this language that performance on its own is only meaningful when it's really tied and linked to well-being, thriving people in our sport or in our business, and to social impact. We are leaving behind a positive mark on communities, on society, on the natural environment, and that, for me, is the sort of challenge of the 21st century to think about. What are the conditions, as you were saying earlier, what's the culture that we now need to enable that?

Colin:

And it is possible. It's possible to do that. You know there was a research paper done in 2016. So it's eight years ago now, as we record this from Alverson and Svenningston. And basically what they said it is possible to shift your culture over time, with a refocus on entrenching different values, different behaviors. I was like, well, okay, I remember reading this a while ago, so I went and had a look. Okay, well, what's something more modern? And so I had a look. I found some research from 2022, which was about influencing team performance, factors influencing team performance and it basically said elite teams need inputs beyond traditional structures of coaching, staff, management and, in the sports world, medical personnel.

Colin:

It's about defining what it means to be a team, which is the things that we talk about, catherine. Things that we have been talking about is what are those characteristics of a team that will then create the foundations for whatever performance looks like? Because, ultimately, there's performance. I always think that we like to grade things. I liken it sometimes to airline loyalty schemes. There's bronze silver, gold, and then you just get to gold and you're like, okay, well, you know, I made it to gold. And then there's platinum, and then there's platinum plus, and then there's the president's club and it's just like it's just never ending, you know, and it's another level to strive for and another level to strive for.

Colin:

Well, actually, the characteristics of, you know, really performing teams with positive cultures, you know, that are full of safety but also of intrinsic motivation, is what, you know, what, what values unite us? What's what's our work ethic? Collectively, you know, you hear these stories as like, oh, so-and-so doesn't have the right work ethic. It's like, okay, well, did you sit down and agree what that would look like? Well, no, it's just up to them to get up every morning and have that. And you know, partly that's right, but partly you've got to. You know, they've got to feel motivated by something. You know, where's the support from leaders to help them do what they need to do? How are we dealing with conflict? How are we making sure that our communication is good. Most teams are, you know, swamped in the business world with emails and then they wonder, well, how do we get to high performance? People have got a thousand emails in their inbox every single day but ultimately, bring the team together to actually agree.

Colin:

Well, what are our norms? You know, going back to Tuchman's model, what are the norms that we want to create that will enable us to move to, you know, kind of perform it. It's something simple as a manager I used to do with my teams. We used to go away for two days every year I've mentioned this before and we would say what's the good stuff that we do, that we want to keep what works well right now, how do we communicate with each other? What behaviors really improve our sense of mental well-being and how we feel about our jobs and each other, and then what's the stuff we want to change?

Colin:

What are the things holding us back? What are the things that lead to us feeling completely ringed out at the end of the day and not in a good way? You know, what are those signs of burnout? I always think when you, by the time you recognize you're burnt out, it's usually too late, and these are just very, very simple things that we can agree and you know, for anybody listening to this, it's how are you going to bring people together to define what performance means, such that it gives you even the slightest opportunity of achieving the results that you've got? Rather, talking about you know kind of high performance is. How do people feel what's getting in the way of work and what will it take to get to the point where people are just getting the job done every day?

Cath:

you're reminding me of some of the brilliant principles that owen eastwood uses, who's a performance coach, who's worked with the new zealand rugby team, the south african cricket team, the recent rider cup team, the South African cricket team, the recent Ryder Cup team, the England football team, and he goes back to he actually draws on the sort of ancient principles of Maori culture. So, really drawing on history, on anthropology and the two basic needs that any team or group have to feel connected to something that has meaning beyond themselves and to be connected to each other those in themselves require us to have quality conversations, as you said you were doing with your team, and those are the important conversations that are drivers for performance, that don't involve just kind of ratcheting up 5% on last year's KPIs. It's about really connecting to the work we do and believing in that sort of process that will create those conditions for everyone to deliver to their potential and to actually sort of not put a KPI ceiling on it but to be thinking what's possible, what's the positive impact we could achieve together. And there are some great coaches now, both across the world who are starting to think differently, and in England, I think, both our England football managers, serena Vigman and Gareth Southgate. They understand the need to create an environment for their players to thrive, to give them the best chance of being able to deliver their best performances on the night. They can't control whether an athlete, whether a football player, is going to hit the crossbar, or referee might make a poor decision. It's not that they're focused on the results. Of course they want to win, of course we do that. That's that's the world that they're in. But actually their job is creating that environment for those players to thrive and together be connected in those moments of pressure. That gives them the best chance of doing their best.

Cath:

And I saw this recently in the boat races this year the Oxford Cambridge boat race and rowing, obviously something I'm very kind of close to and had the opportunity to see up close. The Cambridge women's team and the coach there, patti Ryan, who I've known for a long time, set out at the beginning of the year and year on year, is always trying to develop the culture. Think about what, what, what's needed now to help these students to thrive, who have really incredible pressures on them academic and sporting. And he said you know, I want care to be the guiding principle of everything that we do care for the students, care for the coaching staff, care for everyone else involved and for us to explore. What could that mean. So it's not a sort of right. These are the three things we need to do. It's like if we are a caring culture. What could that look like? What do we need to change? What do we need to do differently?

Cath:

And what was so impressive was where, in the old decades gone and, frankly, in still some environments that would be dismissed as somehow soft and going fluffy, it actually allowed the students to develop a space where they could learn effectively, admit mistakes fail, feel very, very supported in order to then learn from those mistakes.

Cath:

So it enabled very inexperienced rowers to deliver an incredibly gritty performance where they were the underdogs, where they were hugely down in the race, but very focused on how they could sort of support each other in the boat and continually work to deliver their best performance. So even during the race, they're not just chucking in effort here, more effort, beating oxen, all of that sort of old macho language used to get. They're constantly like let's reset, we can get an even better rhythm, let's try and make the next stroke, the next set of strokes, faster than the ones we've done. They're engaged in a performance process that is helping them get the most out of themselves, that they're not being, you know, encumbered by the sort of performance bullshit language of harder, harder, more. Stay in front, be better, be harder, be tougher, and so that, for me, has been just a brilliant example of where a caring, safe environment can really help people develop quickly and powerfully and then be able to be at their best under pressure.

Colin:

And the other thing that I took from that story which is a great story, kat is the sense of the goal is that it's a team goal, it's not on the individual. I think, well, I don't think. I know. I see this all the time in the corporate world, as we individuals have targets and yet they want a high performing team. I was like, well, place the emphasis on the team achieving things, not the individual, and that you know.

Colin:

That story is a great example where the team agreed what they needed to be in order for the team to achieve their goal. You know, when you put the emphasis on the individual, then you're going to get a very individualistic I need to achieve my target, I need to get my bonus, and you're never going to get this to the point where you've got this. You know, really neat, well-defined culture of people who are all pulling in the same direction, want the same things. You've got a culture of people who are all pulling in the same direction, want the same things. You've got a culture of selfishness, folks focused on well, what do I need to? And and often it's a forced selfishness. I'm not suggesting that employees are selfish, but the the organization has put them in that position by saying you, as an individual, need to achieve these things in order that we can achieve our result, rather than making it about the team.

Cath:

Yeah, the incentives, the structures, people against each other. The beautiful thing when the rowers and that crew were talking about wanting to deliver their best for the woman in front of them, for the woman behind them you know that is so magical women behind them you know that is so magical. If you want to explore what's possible collectively, that kind of feeling. You know you really can't invest in that enough. Yeah, I really care about this so much because I feel like we hold ourselves back. You know, that was really what was driving me to write the book was we can find better ways to succeed and if we put more effort into finding those, then you then extraordinary things become possible.

Colin:

I feel like, Cath, we could talk about this all night, but we should probably wrap it up.

Cath:

Yeah, let's get to some practical tips, our three takeaways. So each week we want to give you something to do, something to get curious about, something to uncover. So what should we do? What should we recommend that people do?

Colin:

Well, I think, picking up on that last point that we just took. I think it's really important that teams agree what high performance, or just agree what performance looks like for your team. Let's remove this concept of high performance. What does it mean?

Cath:

Yeah, because nobody wants low performance. Exactly.

Colin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are you striving for? To? Do slightly medium performance. Yeah, we want just below high, but moving up to high. Yeah, what is it? What does it mean for you and your team, particularly as you mentioned, in terms of, you know, kind of the human experience and and and personal and collective growth, and what do we want people to get curious about, Cath?

Cath:

Yeah, so really thinking even more. I think all of this is about really leaning into the how. How can you achieve the objectives that you have, the goals that you have, without compromising well-being and safety? So that's your starting point that those things are absolute priorities, and you're going to make sure you build the how around those. How can you achieve your objectives without compromising well-being and safety?

Colin:

and the last thing to uncover uh, the barriers, probably the barriers to caring and creating safety in the, in the pursuit of whatever performance means for you. It might be an individual, it might be a process, it might be something structural, it might be the fact that you don't have the time to actually or you don't feel you have the time or the agency to agree what performance looks like for your team. So really spend some time thinking about, well, what's actually stopping us agreeing on the conditions that we need to create to get to the point where we're performing as a team.

Cath:

Fantastic. So take action to define the human experience that you want to create on the way to achieving your goals. Get curious about how you can do that without in any way compromising wellbeing and safety. Set yourself that as an objective and then uncover the barriers, the assumptions, the norms, the behaviours that could be getting in the way of a caring, psychologically safe environment and that will help you to define for you a healthy, meaningful culture.

Colin:

Fantastic, another great conversation. Thank you so much, Cath.

Cath:

Great to chat. Bye, great conversation. Thank you so much, Cath. Great to chat.

Colin:

Bye, thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture Podcast. Please remember to like, subscribe and, of course, share with others who you think may be interested.

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Cath Bishop

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Colin D Ellis

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