By Nicole Berg
A high performance culture requires a development culture, said top performance coach, Keith Antoine in his keynote address at the conference.
Antoine, an Olympic and Paralympic athletics coach as well as corporate performance coach, told delegates,
“If you’re in a performance culture, you either continuously improve or you retire.” He asks corporate clients to imagine today is their final day at work, and to ask themselves if they’re clear who’ll replace them, and how well they’ll do the job on a scale of 1-10. He said the big question was then, how diligently and consistently are they working to have their replacement do a better job than them – 1-10?
Antoine shared other key elements he uses in performance conversations with athletes and corporate clients. These included holding the right kind of initial conversation, holding the concept that “working hard is not enough”,
and developing critical in-the-moment thinking and internal motivation.
He said that tricky situations can often be tracked to a lack of clarity at the start. Antoine asks what a client wants, and what they’re prepared to do to get it. He also warns them that things are going to “get nasty” – by which he means challenging. He gets to the bottom of what performance his client wants to achieve, which must be within their control.
In terms of working hard not being enough, he emphasised the importance of improving thinking, and reviewing as well as completing a task. He instructs his athletic clients to think, for instance, “How can I keep my technique at pace?” as they practise, elevating their ability to control so he as coach can focus elsewhere. He suggested managers use this strategy by asking direct reports, “If you’re doing X, what needs to be in your head while doing it?”
Antoine also encourages visioning: “Right is only right until a better right comes along.” He gives the example of high jumping: gold medal high jumpers used to scissor-kick over the bar, until someone tried jumping over backwards.
We can set the bar anywhere and clear it, so long as we’re having effective performance conversations.