What I learned about business after 2,000 hours swimming and cycling.
Over the last 35 years, most of my professional energy has gone into a career in business. My alarm would go off at 5.14am, and I would spend my waking hours in meetings, tending to emails and the other activities that go with the life of a corporate executive. But in the margins I found time to follow my passion for performance sport. Competing in triathlon, tennis and rowing demands discipline, accuracy and attention to detail. I brought some of what I was learning in training into the office. At times I felt that it was a struggle to keep the sport going alongside the demands of the business. However, I can now see that sport not only helped me manage the day-to-day stresses of executive life, but also informed my approach to many business issues. Below I have tried to articulate the top three learning from my sporting journey that I feel could be useful for business:
First, stay on the bus.
I was not optimistic at the start of my first triathlon in 2002. I racked my bike in a massive warehouse among thousands and thousands of other and carefully memorised my grid reference so I could locate it in the crowd when I came out of the water after the swim. First, however, was the small matter of a 1500-meter swim in a London dock. I had never attempted a distance like that before. As the horn signalled the start I was jostled and mangled in a thronging mass of athletes. After about 100 metres of front crawl I reverted to breaststroke and watched everyone swim off into the distance. As I came out of the water in last place, I tried to remember where I had racked my bike. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t. As I looked up the warehouse was empty apart from my bright yellow bike all alone in the middle. I finished the race and caught the bug. During the race I had been passed by several athletes in GB kit and knew immediately that is what I wanted to do. I set myself the objective of competing for Great Britain in my age-group.
Time horizons in business vary. In a large mutual we would develop a five-year plan. At a bank where I worked we would think in multi-years, but the next twelve months was key. In one telecommunications company, at the time the quarterly review ruled supreme. At a retailer, long term was next weekend. Relative to the life of the businesses themselves, all these time spans are short. There is an urgency – and sometimes impatience – in business that means that we tend to frequently review progress, and if the results are not coming quite quickly, it is easy to question the objectives. Additionally, when leadership changes, there is almost always a strategic review and frequently change for the sake of change. It may be that most initiatives don’t fail, they just never get the chance to be followed through to conclusion.
From setting that objective in 2002, I trained hard and consistently but had a few setbacks including Thyroid disease and two slipped discs. I changed event from Triathlon to Aquabike and had a couple of very poor attempts to qualify for my age group. But, in 2018 I scraped into the GB team for the European Championships in Ibiza and in November 2022 crossed the line in 16th place at the World Triathlon Championships in Abu Dhabi. It took me exactly three bikes, two wetsuits, two thousand hours training and 20 years from objective to achievement.
The expression to stay on the bus apparently comes from the system in Helsinki where all the buses loop around the city centre for the early part of their route. It is only towards the end that they fan out and one goes inland, another to the seaside and another to the airport etc. You only get to find out where the bus is going if you stay on it. Of course you can get on the wrong bus or back the wrong project, and it is just as important to know when to cut your losses and stop a project that is not delivering. However, my experience is that it is far more common that initiatives are stopped too soon. Perhaps the learning is that, as one CEO used to say; ‘Don’t pull up the carrots to see if they are growing.’
Second, there’s coaching and there’s coaching.
I work as a coach/mentor/advisor to a number of CEOs. Over my business career I have worked with several coach/mentors/advisors and derived great benefit from these relationships. People have different definitions of what a coach does different to a mentor or advisor but there are two areas where I have felt most benefit. First, a trusted, informed and supportive professional friend who appreciates my efforts. Under the pressure of leadership, it is so wonderful to have someone in your corner who can offer some supportive words when the pressure is on. In my experience, the coach needs to be both practically and emotionally available to provide this level of caring support. Second, a truly expert and experienced coach can offer practical advice.
Some people think that coaches should not offer advice, but I disagree. In a business context I was once really suffering with the intensity of the Board cycle. I found that I was constantly either preparing for the Board cycle, in the Board meetings, or following up on the Board actions. I consulted my coach at the time who ask how many meetings we had per year. ‘eleven’ I replied. ‘Well, why don’t you just have eight?’ he suggested. We did, and it was transformational. In sport, I have swam breathing every three strokes for 20 years. Recently my coach suggested I switch to breathing every two strokes. I made the change and experienced an immediate step up in performance. The thing is the coach needs to really know what they are talking about if they are to offer advice. The business coach in this context is one of the most accomplished FTSE100 chairs, and the sporting coach a former Olympic record holder in the pool.
As well as being truly expert and genuinely caring, I believe that business can learn something from the frequency of coaching contact in the sporting environment. I had a coach early in my triathlon career. He would give me a written training programme and we would chat about progress every few weeks. Most executive coaching engagements involve a formal conversation every four to six weeks. As I refence above, I moved to a new coach about six months ago. He can access all my performance data – including sleep, heart rate, HRV – via a shared app all the time. We shape the programme week by week and day by day dynamically. Most significantly, he asks for a voice note after every session, so he can hear in my voice how I am doing. The impact has been remarkable. To frame the progress, in the twenty years from to 2022 my 100m swim time came down from around two minutes to around one minute thirty seconds. That is an average improvement of one and a half seconds per year. Last week I set a new lifetime PB of 1 minute 20 seconds. An improvement of eight seconds in six months. That is more than a 10x improvement in my rate of improvement. What could that mean in commercial terms?
I am pleased that I do now have regular exchanges with all of the leaders that I work with – most on at least a weekly basis and it grows with time. But I would love to find a CEO that is willing to invest thirty seconds in sharing how each day is going. Taking just a moment to reflect on what went well and what could be better is a proven way to improve performance. And I can tell you that having someone – even if paid – who is interested in how my training is going is massively motivating. Could corporate performance be dramatically improved by increasing the frequency of executive feedback?
Third, trust the process. Properly.
This is hard in business. I suspect we all share a fundamental belief that if you motivate your employees to serve your customers and make sensible commercial decisions, then the business will deliver sustainable profitable growth, and the share price will be fine. But investors commentators and media demand results, results, results. How do we keep our faith that we are doing the right things when the share price is down?
Like all cycling freaks I have a complex watch and constantly play around with the data that it shows when I am racing. There are probably about 100 fields to choose from. Early in my racing career, it would always be set to display speed and time. I would belt out of transition, trying to win the race in the first few minutes of the bike. You can’t win a race in the first few minutes, but you can lose it by going off to hard and becoming anaerobic.
This summer I was racing and at one point I looked down and reflected on what my watch was now set to tell me. Heart rate, power output and distance. Heart rate to ensure that I am broadly in the right zone, but this is a lag indicator – by the time your heart rate is too high, you are too late. That’s why the second measure is power – not to tell me to work harder – but rather to ensure that I am not working too hard. It’s about pacing. And distance tells me how far through the race I am. What I realised in that deeply significant moment on the bike is that none of those measures tell me how I am getting on in the race. None tell me the outcome. They are all process measures. Finally, after 20 years, I had come to trust the process. And properly trust the process – not just say it.
In my last CEO role I became convinced that part of the problem is that financial performance is more measurable and more immediate, and this is a major factor in driving the focus on financial numbers. So we invested in a system that surveyed both our customers and our employees on an hourly basis and the results were visible in real time. I started to get into the habit of looking at this data multiple times per day, and became even more obsessive about how our customers were feeling, and how our people were working. We were lucky, and I would not attribute our success completely to this new system, but I do believe that it helped. And the funny thing is that of all the outcomes I set out to achieve, record profits was not one of them. But, after six years, that is what happened.
There is another benefit to emphasis on the process. That is confidence. Most pre-race or pre-event anxieties fall into two categories: First, fear of disaster and second, fear of underperformance. A rich pool of confidence available in those moments is to come back to the process. If you have done the training, the prework, the preparation- then that is the most we can ask of ourselves. I find that a reassuring thought in moments of pressure.
So, in conclusion…
One of the wonderful things about racing is that you never get there. It never ends and there is something to learn from every step, every session and every race. I have a new objective which is to finish on the podium at the World Championships in 2029. Why 2029? It is far enough away that if I want to forget about training and have a beer I can. But close enough to drag me out of bed on a wet dark wintery Sunday morning. 2029 is also when I move up into the next age category, so theoretically plays to my favour.
More than this, I think about how much I am benefitting from working with an excellent coach, and hope that I might be able to bring some of these disciplines into my work with the leaders that I currently support. I am particularly thrilled that I am starting to have discussions with CEOs about performance that include physical and mental wellbeing. I sense a growing appetite to look at how we can use more of the insight we learn in performance sport to improve outcomes in the business world. And as wearables and AI become more mainstream, the opportunity to further enhance human performance in all aspects of society is probably beyond our current comprehension.