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I was involved with coaching, it’s the girls’ rowing team many years ago to win a new New
England championships. It’s a rowing race. It’s very big. It’s pretty hard to win
and I’ve been involved with the training period right the start. But as the season
went on when I was back in Australia. The girls kept on calling me saying, we haven’t
won, you know. We did that work with you and we haven’t won any races and we keep, you
know, we just get places and you know, we thought we’d be winning. And I said to them,
hang on, you told me you wanted to win the New England championships. You didn’t tell
me you wanted to win every race of the season. So what did you want? And they said, we want
to win the New England championships. So well, until you’ve won it or lost it, this is
all silly discussion or silly distractions.
So one morning, 6:00am Sunday morning I think it was, I got a phone call. Ahhhh everyone’s
going berserk. They’ve won the New England championships. And I asked them to relay how
it happened. And they said we were all in the boat and there’s a feeling you get,
when all is rowing in time, there’s a feeling that the whole boat sort of lifts and picks
up a pace that you couldn’t have gotten either way unless it was exactly the right
timing. And they said, they saw the other boats around them and they had this awareness.
It’s happening because they’ve been preparing for it for so long. And it happened. And there’s
two things that’s happening. There was one, everybody was completely focused on the one
goal and everybody knew it was their time and they’ve been thinking about preparing
for a long time. But two, they’d also been thinking about how they wanted to be in the
boat and what dynamic they wanted to have between each other. And when they’re rowing,
they’re all looking for that. Come on, let’s get in time. Let’s get in time to lift the
boat to that extra speed that’s only available when we’re all in perfect harmony.
Now in a business, the same rules apply that it needs to be that place where we’re heading
to, that goal we’re trying to achieve. But there’s also gotta be the way that we want
to all perform together. What is it that we’re trying to achieve? How are we trying to be
so that we can unleash that ability and achieve that talent? And sometimes, those are in metrics
in the workplace like budgets and KPI’S and the like. And sometimes they’re in how
we would rate our teams on how they make out of a hundred and tests like that. But what
we’ve got to be aware of is that there’s many distractions in things that aren’t
actually relevant to the end product. And that’s where you... Don’t get caught up
in those thinking. That’s performance. So for example, if somebody knocks off a little
early. We got to let him work eight hours. Let’s not directly link. To get the girls
like, we didn’t get to win that race. Let’s not directly link. So be very clear. Whatever
KPI’s you’ve got and, and whatever targets you’ve got and whatever way you want the
team to be, make sure that’s what the discussion is about. And don’t get caught up in whether
or not they work late or whether or not they wearing their attire right and all that nonsense.
Those things need to be done but don’t get caught up in it. Make sure you’re caught
up in the final outcome and how we want to perform together to ensure that we can deliver
that outcome at exactly the right time.