In this Hot Topic, we shed light on how best to manage talent through the lens of sport and through a performance psychology perspective. We hope this month’s Hot Topic will help you to gain deeper, original insights on how to manage talent to create a sustainable culture of high performance.
Coaching your team to success
In the high-pressured and competitive environment of sport, it is crucial to understand how to effectively retain top-level athletes, as well as learning how to successfully release them. Throughout their career, top-level athletes experience many transitions and must learn how to manage and negotiate multiple transitions simultaneously, whilst continuing to perform at the highest level. For this reason, the athlete and their multi-disciplinary team pay a lot of attention to these transitions, preparing and creating the most optimal experience. There is no reason why this can’t be done in business too.
In order to drive team performance and a positive culture, despite the awareness of the potential to be released, it is important to learn from psychological safety. At the core of psychological safety, there is the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. This is important because in order to promote high performance thinking, one needs to be challenged and be accountable for their learning.
Psychological Safety + Resilience = High-Performing Teams
In systems where high performance is a non-negotiable, a key factor is resilience. By creating an environment of psychological safety, then you can promote high performance through the following resilience framework.
The resilience framework focuses on promoting high performance thinking within the context of career transitions by ensuring that high challenge is met with high support. You can promote this by gaining regular feedback from your team about where they think the team currently sits in the table. By drawing upon these, we promote an environment that high performing individuals will thrive in. Where there is high competition for places, you need the psychological safety to take risks, whilst creating a resilient environment to be able to take these risks. In terms of retaining and releasing talent, this is determined by their fit within the chosen context.
Action Point
Based on the information presented in this month’s Hot Topic, what could you do to promote a safe but challenging environment where high performing individuals can thrive?