As the 2020/2021 Olympics kicks off in earnest, I love to take the opportunity to grab a little extra inspiration, motivation and peak-performance-learning from watching the best in the world excel at their sport.

And one of my favourite lessons of all time I’ll take from Team GB Rowing. No gold medals since 1912. To today – and for the last 20+ years! – becoming one of the dominant forces in world outdoor rowing and Team GB’s most continuously successful Olympic sport. And you can trace much of that success to a single question their performance psychology team came up with:

Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?

I love the extreme goal focus of this simple-but-powerful question, ensuring EVERY SINGLE DECISION is a step towards, not away from, the ultimate goal.

As a leader: take a look at your own world. Your leadership goals. Your projects and programmes. Your organisational objectives. Your team.

What are you looking to achieve? And what’s the Olympic-sized question that will get you and your people laser-focused on priority-led, goal-focused decisions?

Define it. And then: ask it. A lot.

And don’t stop there. As the leader who instituted this extreme focus approach, now pay attention to the answers, because asking is only half the power of this strategy …

“Yes”: excellent! How much faster? For how long? By when? What’s the investment? And is it worth the effort? This is valuable, high-quality thinking – and we want to see more of it, from ourselves and the team. So … role model the way. And give the team lots of opportunity to practice, as well as lots of positive attention on that practice.

“No”: ok. Discard that option. But not before asking: What has us looking at an option that isn’t goal focused? Confusion over priorities? The pursuit of lesser goals? A worry about the primary goal? Understand what’s distracting the team – or what about the primary goal has them sidestepping the priority work. There’s valuable learning, there.

“Sort of …”: ok. That’s a no in disguise. Same treatment as above. Plus we get to draw an important distinction between what was probably a good idea – and the really great ideas.

What’s your single, most impactful, Olympic-sized performance question?

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