Winning Strategies

My company Lane4 Management Group has a strong heritage with elite sport – both from the athlete and sport psychology perspective – and focus on the things that are true of both elite sport and elite performance in business.

For instance, we talk quite a bit about mental toughness. One of the biggest obstacles with mental toughness is actually defining what it is and understanding what goes into it. If I reflect back on my career as an elite-level rower, I can certainly pinpoint the qualities and mindsets that helped me get through the really tough spots, and break them down into four primary areas: keeping your head under stress, staying strong in your self-belief (and understanding what self-belief really means), making your motivation work for you and staying focused. Lane4 research has identified that these are the areas that separate the truly mentally tough athletes and business performers from those that aren’t. We are currently helping some of our clients understand that the intense pressure that they are faced with in their respective competitive environments are no different than that of professional or Olympic athletes and the methods of coping are congruent as well. Lane4 has recently published a book titled Developing Mental Toughness: Gold Medal Strategies for Transforming your Business Performance, which does just that; it directly connects the impact of these areas in both sport and business performance.

For me, rowing was my primary focus after graduating from Cornell University in 1991. Like a lot of athletes, I dreamed of being a professional or an Olympian. I’d started rowing in 1984 and made my first junior national team in 1987, winning the World Junior Championships in Germany. It was the first time the US had won the Junior Worlds in the eight, and it became my mission to make the Olympic team. I was unsuccessful at my first attempt in 1992, which provided great motivation to keep going. It was something I really wanted to do and I decided that I was going to train full time for the 1996 team. I trained full-time and made the 1993, 1994 and 1995 US national teams and competed at the World Championships each year. And then came final selection for the 1996 Olympic team.

We trained as a team of 40 trying to make 14 final spots; training all year round in a camp situation living in dormitories, eating cafeteria food, living onsite. We were competing with each other and yet trying to be civil and social with each other at the same time – the pressure was enormous. The complexity of this environment, where teamwork, individual competition and civility must coexist, was not dissimilar to that found in many offices. Relationships built on trust are paramount.

In the final assessment, we had to do a test on the rowing machine that, along with how well we performed on the water and some other factors, formed the coach’s evaluation. The test was to be performed in four waves of 10, and I distinctly remember I was in the third wave; the first two had already gone and 15 of those 20 athletes had achieved personal bests. Two of the people had achieved scores never before seen in this country, and I remember feeling the enormity of the whole four years coming to rest on those last few moments. It felt like my whole identity was tied into rowing; I hadn’t made the 1992 team and was terrified about what would people think if I didn’t make the 1996 team either. I knew had to do something special because people were doing special things, but wasn’t at all sure what I needed to do to achieve a personal best.

It was then that I had my epiphany. I was led on my bed at the training center about 20 minutes before I had to walk down to the boathouse to do the test, thinking about the last few years and all the hard work I had put in. Suddenly I realized that I had control over the situation. It was why I had trained in the first place, and my destiny was still very much in my own hands. I came up with a plan for how I was going to approach the trial, and decided I wasn’t going to do anything dramatically different. I was essentially going to stick to my game plan but go off a little bit faster and trust that the hard work that we had all done previously was what was translating into quicker times.

All of sudden, I felt like there was no reason why I couldn’t achieve a personal best too. Before I took that step back I remember feeling debilitated, like I didn’t want to be there. And then in a matter of moments, by reappraising the situation and realizing that this was exactly why I had trained for four years and that I wouldn’t want it to be any different, my whole mindset changed. I remember feeling completely alive on that walk down to the boathouse. My senses were heightened, I was totally up for the challenge and I couldn’t wait to get down there.

This shift in mindset happened within 10 minutes of reappraising the situation, and I ended up beating my previous best by three seconds and got the fourth best time on the team. It was a revelation in terms of how I could take control of things and how reappraising situations really can have an impact on the end-result. And it’s proof that, when used effectively, pressure can actually help you elevate your game.

It wasn’t until I started working at Lane4 that I realized just what I had done. This is a very effective coping technique that we encourage many of our clients to include in their toolkit of stress management. I don’t think it’s any different in business. When I share stories like that during workshops with major companies, they all say they’ve been there before and have felt the pressure become debilitating. It’s always a revelation for them to realize that they have more control than they thought.

In fact, there is definitely a similarity in mindset between top-level athletes and the most successful managers – after all, many of the symptoms of high-pressured business and high-pressured sport are the same. In both, the difference between success and failure comes down to very small margins and it’s the subtleties that create successful outcomes.

I was a part of three Olympic quadrennials; we had a different coach each time, but only in the last of those four-year periods (from 1996-2000) did I feel we were truly a high-performing team. The main difference was that my coach, Mike Teti, had created a high-performance environment, and it was a big reason why I wanted to come back to rowing. I had actually retired in 1996, but there was something really special about what was going on in that environment and it had a lot to do with the concept of ‘team’.

I noticed the people training in this environment were behaving differently than they were previously. From 1993-96, a different coach created an environment that if you were in the eight-man boat you were a first-class citizen and if you were in any other event, you were second-class. You weren’t given the same sort of opportunities, the same financial rewards or the same creature comforts. In the environment leading up to 2000, however, the team was everything; there was no distinction between crews of different boats, and even if you were the best rower you weren’t given any special privileges. The coach also showed genuine care and concern for the athletes; you felt that even though there were 40 people training for 14 spots, he really wanted everyone to make the squad. The fact that the environment was all about the team and you had a leader that demonstrated a real sense of care for the athletes was infectious, and as a result we all started looking out for each other. It was amazing.

Certainly, the kind of environment a leader creates will strongly dictate whether a team is going to be high performing or not. At Lane4, we believe that leadership behaviors are centered around three areas: vision, challenge and support. You need to clearly communicate what the vision is and provide a role model for that vision; you need to properly challenge individuals and your team; and provide the support to back up these challenges. The coach that we had leading up to 2000 was a master at balancing these three elements, and resulted in us winning the 1999 World Championships and being the only team to qualify for all 14 rowing events in the Sydney Olympics. We were always connected to the vision, we were always challenged, but he’d created an environment that was also very supportive.

My advice to business managers is to understand your people, understand what motivates them and create an environment that will foster that. We believe that you cannot motivate people. You can inspire them, but they have to be able to motivate themselves, and in order for that to happen you have the role of creating the environment that they find motivating to work in. There’s a real distinction there.