Teamership: When it's hard to be at your best
A path to your best is reducing the frequency, intensity and duration of your poor performance. Photo by Michael DeMoya on Unsplash
If the goal of being a great team member is to bring out our best and bring out the best in others, it could feel like we need to be at our best all day every day. I’m not sure that’s a very useful reference point.
I often like to remind participants in my program that we work with humans, not resources. We might expect consistently high performance from our resources (like the fact that our cars should always be ready to be driven). It's not reasonable or helpful to expect a consistent level of high performance from ourselves or other humans.
The fact is that we can't be at our best all of the time.
If we zoom out far enough and look at our best over the course of a day, week, month or career there will be peaks and troughs. Peaks are followed by troughs.
I recently saw about 30 seconds of a Tiger Woods program about his golf game. He remarked that in professional golf, the differentiator was not people's peaks - it was their troughs. The way he put it was..."Out here, everyone's good is good. The question is how good is your bad?".
Through that lens, it is easier to see that bringing our best over a longer period is a function of both your peaks and your troughs.
For that reason, there can be real value in understanding what things - either within you or around you - can make it hard for you to bring your best. We can then make decisions about how to minimise, manage or mend those factors so that we can reduce the frequency, intensity and duration of the troughs.
It sounds counterintuitive - and definitely doesn’t feel like a very “motivational speaker” - to say that a path to your best is reducing your poor performance. It is, however, both true and useful.
A few questions for you to consider this week:
What internal factors make it difficult to bring your best?
Consider physical (sleep, diet, exercise) and psychological (values, motivation, task preference).What environmental factors make it hard for you to bring your best?
Consider physical (natural light, ambient temperature, extended sitting) and social (relationships, psychological safety, engagement with your organisation)What impacts might there be if you were able to reduce the frequency, intensity and duration of your poor performance?