Imagine the scene, it’s 8am on a very cold fresh Scandinavian morning and 23 elite biathlon athletes line up at the start, their skis beautifully waxed and their small bore rifles prepped ready for action. This is an important race, the outcome will contribute to determining a place in the national squad. One of the competitors, let’s call him ‘Johan’, had, the previous night, enjoyed a heavy night of drinking and eating with friends. He has a bit of a thick head this morning but he’s ready for action.
No-one would be surprised if Johan came last. It is almost impossible to imagine an elite athlete adopting such a lax attitude to proper preparation before a critical race. Athletes understand the importance of diet, the right exercise, sleep, psychological preparation and a lifetime of skills development needed to earn the right to be a contender at an elite level. They make decisions everyday about what they eat and drink. They know that thousands of small decisions will cumulatively aid successful performance. Knowledge of the importance of nutrition, hydration and training have trickled down to weekend athletes. It is not uncommon to find a group of amateur cyclists on a ride fuelled by the latest in sports drinks and gels and consuming high protein shakes post ride to aid recovery.
Yet, somehow, there is a reluctance to see these very same variables as critical in elite business performance. Just as with sport, to achieve an elite level of performance takes thousands of hours of practice getting good at whatever aspect of sport or business you have chosen to focus on, be that ‘comps and ben’, HR, IT or finance. And, as all of our recent articles have shown here on LinkedIn, there is overwhelming evidence that exercise, sleep and nutrition have a positive psychophysiological impact on work performance. The difficulty is that too often in business, factors such as sleep and nutrition are seen as well-being activities and viewed as ‘nice to do’s’, rather than as core to business performance.
Our prediction is that in the next decade, the growing awareness of how our physiology fundamentally impacts our ability to operate to our full potential will mean that we will view elite business people as elite business athletes. There will be an expectation that if you wish to perform optimally then in just the same way that elite athletes make choices everyday about what they eat, when they rest and how they train to enable them to perform at their best, so too will business athletes. Our prediction is that senior business executives will have coaches who do not just deal with the way they think but also work with coaches in other areas of human performance to develop the whole person.
Given the price companies pay for top executives, optimising their performance to get the very best from them makes absolute sense. For example, monthly board meetings might start with a warm-up walk followed by some breathing exercises designed to drive a strong parasympathetic response to get people into the right frame of mind. Knowing a board meeting was coming up, board members would have dined on an appropriate breakfast a couple of hours beforehand to ensure their blood sugar levels were at the right levels to facilitate effective decision taking. The meetings would be in a place where periodically a break in the meeting would allow a walk outside in a natural environment to aid psychological restitution. The snacks provided in the meeting would not be biscuits but food known to aid performance (almost certainly NOT sports drinks and gels, however!).
In just the same way that Johan’s pre-race behaviour was so innapropriate, so too would be a late night with a heavy meal and several glasses of wine in preparation for a board meeting. People in the future would respond in the same way you might to Johan’s decisions, “Why would someone want to underperform in this way?”
Over recent articles we have examined the impact of sleep, diet, exercise and breathing on workplace performance, but there can be no escape from the thousands of hours of hard graft required to develop the skills of the job. No amount of salads and afternoon naps will help you improve your skills as an accountant or as an HR professional, just as no amount of salads and afternoon naps will help you become an elite biathlon athlete - you still need to invest in the skills to ski and shoot well.
When skill acquisition is combined with a deep understanding of human performance, the potential increase in personal performance is huge. Organisations are at the cusp of recognising this. Those that implement a holistic approach to workplace performance will, we believe, steal a march on the competition.
Dr Dominic Irvine and Professor Emeritus Simon Jobson