What fun it has been to ride the Olympics bandwagon!
If we are to believe everything we read, the past weeks have been not only a world-class sporting event, but also one of the most educational fortnights in recent memory.
David Cameron told the nation to use the Olympics as a springboard to even greater achievements, by learning the lesson that “if you want to achieve great things, you need to work really hard.”
Mervyn King told the city to emulate the fair play and work ethic of the athletes.
(I’m not sure this comparison is as comfortable as it could be for the Governor. If the bankers are athletes, that makes the Bank of England the World Anti-Doping Agency. Which means they spent 2000 – 2008 snoozing while some of the “athletes” took enough steroids to kill a herd of elephants, ran the 100 metres in 6 seconds, and then had a series of massive heart attacks we’ll spend the next 20 years paying for. Still, I know what he’s getting at…)
I enjoyed my own whizz on the bandwagon, writing an article linking management development with Usain Bolt. Well, they were a delirious two weeks, and it felt like anything was possible.
Now the euphoria is fading, the question remains: what can we really take from the Olympics? What can we copy that will create Olympian success in our businesses?
What the Olympics can most usefully teach (or remind us about) is not a single idea, but a skill. It is this: what creates success in any walk of life is the ability to turn ideas into results. This is what many of the most successful Olympic teams did: took ideas and turned them into results.
Olympian endeavour
In an interesting twist on the advice that we all start thinking like sportsmen, David Brailsford used ideas from the business world to help the GB cycling team dominate the velodrome. The point is not where the ideas came from (sport, business, it doesn’t matter), the point is he found a way to turn those ideas into results on the track.
So, rather than taking any particular idea as our guiding light – however valid thoughts like David Cameron’s “work really hard” may be – we are better served to adopt an over-arching principle: our job is to turn ideas into results.
As soon as we have adopted this maxim, everything else flows from it.
If our job is to turn ideas into results, we will soon develop a nose for ideas that are likely to produce results, and to discard those that sound good but are unlikely to deliver anything tangible.
We will also become skilled at taking ideas and actually using them, over a sustained period, to get the results we want. (How many of us have a knock-out, sure-fire idea lying around in our mind – an idea that is exciting and practical, that will definitely propel our business forward – that we have never put into action?)
There is no shortage of ideas in my sector. Our universities have more Professors of Leadership than ever before. The hunt is on for the last manager alive who does not know her Myers Briggs type, preferred leadership style, and personality colour. Everyone’s a coach.
And yet a government report recently concluded: “The evidence suggests that one of the fundamental problems holding back the growth of smaller and medium sized organisations is a lack of leadership and management capability.”
This can’t be through lack of ideas, can it? It must be through lack of ideas that can be turned into results, and lack of focus on actually creating those results.
This is our Olympian endeavour: to turn ideas into results. With this in mind, be inspired, choose your ideas, and then deliberately, consistently and systematically apply them to create the future you want. And maybe the next generation of Olympians will come to you for inspiration.
Sean Lapham is project director for leadership and management training consultancy, Mitchell Phoenix.
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