I had the opportunity to watch Gilbert Enoka present at one of the events that I was participating in. He has a long history of success as a mental skills coach with New Zealand’s corporate and sporting elite. He is internationally renowned for his 19 year history with the All Blacks (New Zealand Rugby team), first as their mental skills coach and now as manager. He has been with the All Blacks for over 250 tests and during that time the team has won back-to-back Rugby World Cups, one Laureus Award (for the best team in the world), 17 Bledisloe Cups, three Grand Slams, seven Tri Nations and five Rugby Championships.

So, I would say, he knows something about achieving and sustaining high performance. So, when he condenses his insights and shares them, we need to sit up and take notice. You can watch his complete talk here.

Here are the lessons that he shares in his talk. You might find some of these pretty basic and too simple. The true power of these lie in their simplicity.

1. No Silver Bullets or Magic Solutions:

There are no silver bullets or magic solutions or shortcuts that can lead to achieving and sustaining high performance. As he says,

High performers work hard, Elite performers work harder!!!

– Gilbert enoka

There are no compromises either. There are only two ways to do things – “the right way and again”.

He also says, we need to have three bones to be successful – A Wish bone (that allows us to dream), A Back bone (which allows us to overcome the inevitable challenges when we are chasing a big dream) and A Funny bone (which allows us to not take either ourselves or the situation too seriously and makes the overall journey of achieving our dreams fulfilling).

2. Radically Traditional:

This concept of radical traditionality was something new, something that I had not come across and expressed in this form before. What he means by this is two things – Protect that which is uniquely you, your core; and disrupt the edges – continuously experiment and tweak things which are at your edges and are not uniquely you. If expressed in another form, this could be construed to be equal to “Play to your strengths and experiment with everything else”, which is only partially true.

By calling this “Being Radically Traditional”, he has combined traditionality and newness together and at the same time defined, what part of the tradition do we need to preserve and what part of it can be allowed to evolve. In my experience, the core of almost anyone or anything is usually unchanging. This is what defines us. By staying true to that, we are being authentic to ourselves and at the same by disrupting at the edges, we are constantly exploring and discovering ourselves as well. They can be seen as the Yin and Yang or two sides of the same coin, of self-discovery.

While we continue to disrupt, he also believes that we can get to a 1000% improvement, by improving a 1000 things by a 1%.

3. Success is a Lousy Teacher:

If we are going after high performance and want to sustain it, we can safely assume that we do win a lot and are successful more often than not. It is also well-known that there is a lot that we can learn from our failures. However, not many of us learn a lot from our successes.

In order for us to learn from our successes, we need to create structures that allows us to look at our successes and separate out the reason for the same – is it due to our decisions and actions or is it due to luck or due to any other reason. Once we have identified the key contributors to our success, we then need to look at the alternatives that we had considered and think about how things could have turned up, if we had chosen an alternative that we had seriously considered. Would it have been better or worse?

It take a lot more conscious effort to find learnings from our successes. It also requires radical honesty with ourselves, in order to truly find the key learning from our successes. If we really want to sustain high performance, we need to find a way that works for us to continue to learn from our successes.

4. Culture eats strategy for breakfast:

This is such a cliche but as they say, cliches endure because there is some truth to them. Culture in a way is the environment in which we live and work in. It is the way people around us behave and make decisions. It is the collection of our physical, social and emotional environment.

In my humble opinion, culture is like the operating system – it defines the limits of what is possible for each individual program operating on it. So, it is extremely difficult and may be even impossible for us to do something that the culture is not set up to support. Even if we are able to achieve success once despite the culture, it can not be sustained over a period of time. This is the reason why culture is so important.

Culture is not easy to define and control and yet is simple to manage – do what you say you will do and behave as you would expect others to behave in a given situation. Ultimately, the behaviour of leaders is replicated all across the organisation. The two extremes of behaviours – what is tolerated and what is celebrated – defines the range of behaviours we tend to see.

For us as individuals, culture is the summation of our physical and social environments and our internal self-talk.

5. Be at your best when your best is needed:

Not all moments in time are equal in terms of their significance and the impact on performance. So, it is important for us to be aware of the situation and the demand of the situation. Trying to deliver high performance at all times can become exhausting and can easily tire us out. Sustaining high performance then is all about knowing the demand and the impact any given situation can have and responding to it accordingly.

The key to this is our ability to dial up and dial down our intensity at will and the wisdom or awareness to know what level of performance is needed in any given situation. This skill or ability is what separates the consistent high performers, who are able to sustain their performance all through their long careers and those who are like a flash in the pan or are one hit wonders.

6. The Gap:

The most singular driver for high performance is the drive to get better, which means that we know where we are, we know where we want to be and there is a gap between them. In order for the gap to drive us, it should create discomfort within us. Once we are uncomfortable about how big the gap is, we are motivated to act upon it and reduce the gap.

The next important thing is to know exactly where to start and what does the next step look like. What is the core that we need to protect? Where at the edges can we disrupt? What 1000 things can we improve by 1%? What 1 thing can we improve by a 1000%? Can we be creative enough to bridge the gap, in a sustainable way? The answers to these questions propel us towards high performance. Ongoing discomfort with the gap sustains the high performance.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, I believe that these are the foundational enablers for sustained high performance. The thing is that they all need to come together. It is not enough to have a few of these in place. It doesn’t work until all of them are present.

Also, these are relevant for both individuals and teams. There are some other critical elements that need to fall in place to enable them to deliver and sustain high performance over a period of time. Diversity, leaders worth following, cultures worth contributing to and work worth doing also play a significant part.