In an exclusive column, Peter Hodgkinson, the former Head of Build at Mercedes F1, sets out the considerations that helped him to lead in one of sport’s most high-pressured arenas.
Main Image: Getty Images / Mark Thompson
Not only is it difficult to fully see someone’s body language, it also makes it near impossible to see a leaking water pipe at the front of an engine!
In my opinion, you need to be present in a high-performance environment.
I served as Head of Build at Mercedes between 2011 and 2019, an era when we won five driver’s and five constructor’s world championships. It was a period of unprecedented success for the team and for at least part of that time I worked out of a small, tired office in the middle of the team’s factory.
It was a terrible space. It had no natural light, the AC was incredibly bad, and the ceiling tiles were water-stained. Admittedly, I couldn’t see those tiles – or the worn-out carpet, come to think of it – as easily at 7:30am when six or seven people turned up for work and squeezed into a room that was more suitable for four.
I wasn’t sad when that office was finally knocked down as part of a factory refurbishment, but it had been a home away from home. For 20 years I’d spent more time there than I did at home.
Peter Hodgkinson holds the Formula 1 Drivers’ and Constructors’ World Championship trophies in his ‘dreary’ former office at Mercedes HQ in Brackley, Northamptonshire.
This story (at least my schedule, if not the dreary office) probably sounds familiar to many of you. I was routinely on the road at 5:15am and did not leave until 6:30pm most evenings. Of course, I left my phone on just in case.
Such scenarios in high-performance are not going to change any time soon, but there are several things that you can do as a leader to protect yourself and your team from excessive workloads while still delivering the required work.
There are sure to be other things, but these five considerations make a good starting point.
I believe it was important to be seen and to say at least ‘good morning’ to as many of my team as possible. I wanted them to feel that I cared for them and I was interested in what they were working on and the issues that they faced; and it was another opportunity for information gathering.
When we were in the build period or working on a big update, I would try and get to work in time to talk to the nightshift in Build, Compbond, Inspection etc to get an understanding of the current status and get a head start thinking about what I had learnt. This floor walking – asking questions, providing challenge, learning about the current status and building relationships – as I said, I don’t think you can do this as effectively on Teams or Zoom.
I’ve touched upon this before. I never tried to plan more than 30 percent of my day. Most days, meetings were added into my calendar which I needed to attend and, if I had a big gap, I would try and block it out for my work.
We think of work as writing plans, answering emails, attending meetings, doing things, etc but floor walking and talking to people is just as important and is part of the job. It might not feel like work as you have nothing physically to show for it, but it is so important as you are building relationships with your team which is an essential part of the trust equation.
As a leader, you cannot be chained to your desk doing work, looking at your feet and never lifting your head to talk to your team.
Manage your job list by focusing on getting things done. But don’t just keep adding to the job list. Create movement.
Trying to have 70 percent of my day unplanned also meant that I had a pretty good chance of achieving the 30 percent that I did have planned, so I felt like I got stuff done and when I went home, I felt that I had achieved something.
This is important. We all like big, long job lists. It makes us feel valued, but if we just keep adding to them it is soul destroying, as you never feel like you have achieved anything. Try and get three things done each day, completed and finished. This is movement, placing a real mental focus on a task to get it completed. This is what I attempted to do from 6:00am to 8:00am each day. With the 30 percent rule, if there is a crisis that does require your full attention, then you should have some capacity to manage it without impacting too much of your day.
Dr Ceri Evans got me thinking about tasks in this way:
Name it: What is the technical task you are undertaking? Give it a name.
Time it: Add a deadline for when you are going to get this task completed. This adds pressure which gives us energy to perform.
Move it: Time to step in and perform. Complete or complain, it is your choice. Try three times a day for 15 minutes to focus on a task and get it completed. This is movement.
Trust is at the heart of any team’s performance. Trust is choosing to risk making something you value, vulnerable to another person’s actions. It happens in small moments when you have the opportunity to increase your trustworthiness.
For example, I tried to keep meetings to a minimum as I wanted to walk around and talk to people and follow up on issues. It was important to me to be connected to what was going on in the workshops and for the technicians to know that I cared deeply about what they were doing and the effort they were putting into their piece of the puzzle.
After clearing as many emails as possible, I would try and get out the door by 6:30pm and leave the Team Leaders to it. As I said, the phone was always on but, on the whole, it didn’t ring that much in the evenings or at night because the team knew what to do and what was required.
In short, they had my trust. I believe trust is made up of the following:
Reliability: You turn up at the same time every day, you deliver the work, you can be counted on in a crisis to be there. You are present.
Competent: You are knowledgeable and you know how to do the work to the best of your ability.
Relationship: You need to have a relationship with the people you are interacting with. Find out about what they like and dislike; be curious about them as a person.
In F1, I tried to get to a position where 80 percent of what we did was planned and 20 percent was chaos. The chaos makes the job both challenging and fun. It’s one of the reasons you get out of bed in the morning.
When the chaos hits 40 or 50 percent, this is too much and it leads to overload and overwhelm. Cracks will start to show in the team’s behaviours and the quality of the work will decline.
As a leader, you need to manage this carefully and do everything in your power to protect your team as much as possible from the really impossible requests.
Peter Hodgkinson on the factory floor at Mercedes HQ in Brackley, Northamptonshire.
Sometimes you have to say ‘no’, but make sure you have other alternative options ready to present. You can’t just say ‘no’. There is a very fine line between protecting your team from excessive workload and delivering the required work to support the plan so if you do push back, make sure you can fully explain your concerns with facts, not just emotions.
Peter Hodgkinson is a leadership and performance specialist skilled in helping high-performers become better at what they do. As an accomplished manager and mechanic, Peter has enjoyed almost three decades of success in elite sporting environments. His work in motorsport, as part of winning teams at Le Mans and Daytona, culminated in seven Formula 1 driver’s world championships won at Brawn and Mercedes, where he led car-building operations. Peter was Mercedes’ Head of Build during Lewis Hamilton’s era-defining run of six world titles. After a spell serving as Mercedes’ Head of Employee Engagement, Peter returned to the Factory Floor as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team when Mercedes supported their quest for the 37th America’s Cup.
If you would like to speak to Peter, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.
The 2008 world champion joined Mercedes in 2013 and would win a further six titles with the team. But, as Peter Hodgkinson tells us, things got off to a rough start. What followed as the team rebuilt the car was a case study in performance under pressure. But it started with a quick spot of lunch.
Main Image: Paul Gilham / Getty Images
Lewis’ rear brakes failed on his 16th lap and he careered into a wall at turn six, which is known as ‘Dry Sack’ corner. He emerged from the wreckage unhurt but his car’s front wing assembly, front uprights and the floor were all damaged in the accident and we had no spares at the circuit. To compound matters we also needed to supply a fix for that rear brake failure.
As the Head of Build for Mercedes F1, I was one of the first to receive the bad news from the Race Team in my office back at our HQ in Brackley, Northamptonshire. Not long after I put down the phone, Aldo Costa, our Engineering Director, came to find out the status of available spares.
The crash had only just happened so I did not have all the answers. I told Aldo I would get back to him shortly. I said much the same to Rob Thomas, our COO, when he stopped by. It was not long before a stream of people came to my office looking for answers and a plan. It was a big moment and I could feel the pressure building. I told some to stand by and others to go and gather information.
Then I told everyone I was going to lunch.
I could see the shock on their faces. How can you eat at a time like this?
For my part, I needed to get out of my office. I normally ate lunch at my desk so my trip to the canteen was out of character. People could see that. I sat on my own and ate for 20 minutes but at the same time my mind was going flat out.
When I got back to my office I knew what we needed to do.
Mercedes teammates Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton in 2013. Photo: Clive Mason / Getty Images
I called everyone to gather around for a short meeting (no one else had moved). We figured out what we knew and what required answers then came up with a basic plan and assigned responsibilities. The Composite Build team looked after the floor and the front wing along with Compbond and the design team. Sub Assembly had to look after the front uprights that were still in the Machine Shop.
I went looking for what we didn’t know because we couldn’t afford any surprises. The Race Team in Jerez needed sufficient time to rebuild the car. I needed to know both the latest the private jet could depart from the airport in nearby Oxford and if a car floor would even fit through the door of the plane. We also booked extra vans to take parts to Jerez and assigned extra people to support repairs at the circuit.
Once we had timings, we were able to understand what we could achieve in the time available. I’d like to think everyone had clearly defined roles and knew their responsibilities. There were so many details to sort out and any one of those could have prevented the car from running the next day.
Instead of meetings – there simply wasn’t time – I walked a thousand miles around the factory gathering and communicating information, asking and answering questions. That communication was dynamic. It was mostly verbal but reinforced with an email when time permitted. I kept Rob and Aldo informed of progress. The late Barry James, who was our Composite Manufacturing Manager, and Darren Burton, our Ops Director, worked with their departments to ensure we got all the support required.
The car ran the next day. It was a true team effort. The damaged parts were returned from Jerez for inspection, repair and service and a fix was sent out for the rear brake issue. It was an amazing recovery from a difficult situation, but that is Formula 1.
So, what did I learn? These moments are important, as the way you react to them is what you will be measured by as a person and a leader. If you think back on your careers, you will have good and bad moments. Some will be short, others will be longer. It will not stay tough forever, it will get better, but nor will it stay under control. Something will happen.
It is important to think about your behaviours in good and bad moments.
Firstly, Lewis’ crash hit five pressure drivers:
So, why I did I go to lunch?
I want to explain my rationale with reference to Dr Ceri Evans’ Red-Blue model, as set out in his 2020 book Perform Under Pressure. I cannot recommend it highly enough for a fuller, clinically-informed account of the principles of performance under pressure and how one can gain emotional control at the times when you need it most.
Ceri proposes a three-step model:
Here, I’ll explain how I approached each in turn after Lewis hit that wall.
The Step Back
I needed to go to lunch. I was under pressure and could feel it. I had to get out of my office and away from the noise. I realised that this was a flight response. I also realised I was under both internal and external pressure. My heartrate was up and you are trying to think of numerous things at the same time. Going to lunch allowed me to move from Step Back to Step Up. It gave me a moment to move away from the emotional response and start to come up with a mental plan of what we were going to do next.
The Step Up
You need to understand what is going on and start coming up with a plan for what you need to do and the desired outcome you seek.
In Step up mode, I was moving from Red mind to Blue mind. This requires a further explanation with a little help from Ceri, who describes two interacting mental systems:
Neither state is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. There must be a balance, as too much Red can make you impulsive, emotional and reactive, while too much Blue can leave you detached and hesitant.
In Step Up mode, I was moving from Red to Blue, from emotions and feelings to logic and planning. I allowed my Blue to dampen the Red. I now had an idea of a plan and what we needed to do and I remember very clearly feeling energised and ready to rock ’n’ roll.
The Step In
You have a plan to start tackling the issue, using the clarity of the Blue combined with the energy of the Red system. Trust you skillset, you are the best in the world at what you do.
We talked through the basic plan and off we went to face the challenges in front of us. During the course of that day, well into the evening, I remember going back to Step Back mode as something went wrong but this was quickly followed by Step Up (planning) and Step In (doing). Red/Blue, Decide and Do.
That day I was in a purple patch, balancing the Red and Blue.
How this impacted my behaviour
I knew that how I behaved and the language I used would impact the people working on this challenge. The pressure was on and one wrong word could trigger a shift back to a Red brain response, which we simply could not afford.
I also felt trusted by Aldo and Rob, who knew I would play my part to help resolve the issues along with the rest of the team. They didn’t interfere with what we were doing and allowed us to get on with the job. We made sure to regularly check-in with them both, providing updates and seeking their thoughts on something in those moments when we were stuck. It was classic Intent-Based Leadership in action.
This was one of many situations we faced weekly at MGP and no F1 team is any different.
You will be judged on how you respond and react to these moments. It is not about placing blame, it is about movement and making extraordinary things happen using the right mindset and behaviours.
Finally, there will always be lessons from these moments, so make the most of them. They are a great opportunity to improve as individuals, teams and organisations.
Lewis Hamilton, with Lotus driver Kimi Räikkönen and Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg on his tail at the 2013 Australian Grand Prix. Photo: Ker Robertson / Getty Images
Peter Hodgkinson is a leadership and performance specialist skilled in helping high-performers become better at what they do. As an accomplished manager and mechanic, Peter has enjoyed almost three decades of success in elite sporting environments. His work in motorsport, as part of winning teams at Le Mans and Daytona, culminated in seven Formula 1 driver’s world championships won at Brawn and Mercedes, where he led car-building operations. Peter was Mercedes’ Head of Build during Lewis Hamilton’s era-defining run of six world titles. After a spell serving as Mercedes’ Head of Employee Engagement, Peter returned to the Factory Floor as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team when Mercedes supported their quest for the 37th America’s Cup.
If you would like to speak to Peter, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.
John Bull of Management Futures outlines what it takes to deliver coordinated efforts within a team.
“When you get everyone in a system pushing in the same direction, it can have a multiplier effect. The momentum of each person’s efforts building on each other,” said John Bull, the Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures.
“It is,” as he adds, “a key area of performance at which we can all get better.”
In his online presentation for members of the Leaders Performance Institute, Bull outlined the common obstacles as well as steps all teams can take to get better at coordinating their efforts.
How alignment affects performance
Alignment – the coordinated efforts of a team – takes several forms. Each has different implications for performance outcomes.
Bull illustrated some of those differences using mathematical symbols (and idea lifted directly from Ineos’s Sir Dave Brailsford).
In an ideal world, each stakeholder’s efforts would multiply the others in this fashion:
“One person’s talent is building on and adding,” says Bull. “The multiplication becomes exponential.”
He used the analogy of a group of people pushing a car up a hill. “It’s also about timing. Are we pushing at exactly the right time, which is really what the multiplication symbol is because you get this amplifier effect.”
Additions are more commonly found, but it’s not true alignment:
“What I would mean by a plus is that two parts of the organisation are still moving in the same direction, still aiming at the same goal, but it’s not joined up. It’s independent activity,” said Bull. “They’re still adding their talent, so it’s still a positive contribution, but you’re not getting that momentum multiplier effect. And we all know what that feels like.”
The risk is that subtractions or divisions rear their ugly head:
“If you’ve got two parts of the organisation with very different interpretations of the strategy, you have it taking away from each other,” said Bull of the subtraction.
As for the division symbol, “that would be where, politically, you’re starting to get factions, briefing to the media, or people actively recruiting allies against another part of the organisation. Or sometimes where you have a board or owner deliberately undermining the coach.”
If teams are to achieve the multiplier effect, Bull highlighted five critical considerations:
1. Who?
Who are you trying to align and what different talents can you bring to bear on a problem? Be sure to involve all relevant parties, including those who may be excluded for fear that they will be distracted.
2. What are you trying to achieve and by when?
Misalignment often arises not from disagreement on the goal itself, but on the timeline and resources needed to achieve it.
3. Alignment on strategy i.e. the ‘how’
The distinction between strategy (high-level direction) and tactics (specific applications) is not always understood.
4. Ways of working
Alignment is an outcome of agreed processes of communication, collaboration and decision-making.
5. Vertical and horizontal dimensions
While vertical alignment (e.g. between board and coach) attracts a lot of focus, horizontal alignment between departments or teams underpins a truly joined-up approach.
Bull then highlighted some common tensions:
He said: “The reason I want to share these is to highlight where you might go for opportunities for improvement. Where do you see the opportunities for improvement in your environment and what’s your role in that? Where can you make a difference?”
The same goes for tests of alignment:
Each type of test presents opportunities to strengthen systems through reflection, planning and proactive leadership if you’re minded to look.
What actually works?
Bull suggested several methods for Leaders Performance Institute members to mull over:
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Rakesh Patel is tasked with helping floundering NHS hospitals in England. He believes the answer lies in cultural transformation, empathetic teaching, and smarter feedback.
Having read that, you may think that just as readily applies to the world of sport.
“How can we transform underperforming environments into thriving ones?”
That is the question Rakesh Patel, a nephrological surgeon who works at Barts Hospital in London, asked the audience at last November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit.
His remit includes working on the NHS’s Recovery Support Programme [recently renamed the Provider Improvement Programme], which is designed to support underperforming hospitals and medical providers who have been placed in ‘special measures’.
Patel and his colleagues will work with these hospitals to help identify systemic issues that lead to habitual failures. They will implement evidence-based interventions and build local capacity to sustain improvements once they’ve left the building.
Away from clinical practice, Patel is a professor at Queen Mary University, where 2,300 medical students matriculate at any one time.
As such, he has given a lot of thought to learning and failure in the NHS, which is the ‘sacred cow’ of British society.
What does the Recovery Support Programme do?
Its aim is to mitigate crises and enable people to learn from their mistakes. For Patel, it has to start with rethinking underperformance, because jumping to conclusions helps no one.
“We only see the world as we see it, but not how others see it,” he says. “In a performance role, if we’re assessing someone, we often see the world as we think it should be and not actually how it is.”
Underperformance, whether in experienced clinicians or medical students, cannot always be attributed to a lack of skill or effort.
Just as distractions, pressure, poor communication or emotional stress are prevalent in sport, their presence is felt with greater consequence in medical settings.
Take this feedback from medical students when reflecting on video footage of their mistakes:
“The last one upset me most as a doctor,” says Patel, who later added that judgement can degenerate into reported cases of outright hostility. “I found it upsetting that these doctors were coming in to do work and we’re being nasty to them and that was why they were underperforming.”
At some level, as Patel explains, these errors point to the human limitations of working memory.
He cites The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, the highly regarded 1956 paper by psychologist George A Miller, who said that a person has a working memory capacity for five chunks of information, plus or minus two. That means placing the working memory under too much strain will lead to (often avoidable) errors.
Patel says: “Any threat to working memory will impair performance. If you need your brain and you need to think through things, it’s likely you’re going to have underperformance.”
It follows then that to enable better learning – and prevent avoidable errors – there needs to be less pressure on people’s working memory.
“If you add up all those bits contextual things – inattention, distraction – you can see why memory matters,” says Patel. “You can literally only remember three to seven things and, in that moment, when it hits your eyes and your ears, if you do not do something with it in the first half a second to three seconds, it’s gone. That’s why in high pressure situations when we’re under stress is when our memory gets hit. We can only focus on what we need to.”
That is why medicine values reps and evaluation as much as any team. “When things get complex, you don’t need to think about it.”
With this in mind, it is easier to choose the right form of feedback.
“We all talk about feedback and there’s probably more books on feedback than anything else,” says Patel. “There is an evidence base around how you give it and we wanted to give the best feedback, in the way that it needed to hit and cut through.”
This was tricky to navigate in hospitals placed under special measures. “They weren’t the easiest characters to work with,” he adds, “but it depends on what’s important. If there’s the greater good and we’re going to work together, then even the biggest ego you can get down to your level and work through.
“And we only went into hospitals if we had CEO buy-in and everyone was going to engage. So we taught them how to give feedback better.”
He highlighted four formats favoured in the NHS:
1. Facilitated self-reflection
“One of the most important interventions you can ever do is ask someone ‘how do you think that went?’ And if you do that before they start and you say ‘how well do you think you’re going to do before you start?’ You then get them to calibrate what they think with what you think.”
It was, as Patel says, “the lightbulb moment”. He also underlines the value of sitting with doctors as they watch themselves on video. “It’s not about telling them what they’ve done but asking them; ‘these are your notes, you wrote them, tell me what you were thinking at the table’. You don’t dictate, but get them to reflect.”
2. Revisit video assessments at periodic intervals
Patel and his colleagues test doctors and students from the outset and provide instant feedback. More critically, however, they will also revisit feedback at regular intervals over the following weeks.
“I’ve told you about working memory and fear – they’re going to forget it,” he says of that instant appraisal. “So we videoed everything and we drip fed the feedback over time. Why was that important? Because I don’t know if you’ve ever done it, but watching yourself make a mistake three or four weeks down the line when you know you’ve made that mistake, and being reminded of it, is really powerful.”
3. Peer to peer learning
Sometimes Patel takes himself out of the equation. “We often forget what it’s like to be a novice. That’s why peer-to-peer works really well. So if you’ve got someone new, get someone who’s of a similar age that can explain it better.”
4. Ask them to ‘teach it back’
“We do this when we teach clinical skills,” says Patel, alluding to evidence pointing to the efficacy of this approach to learning. “There’s something about having the confidence plus the competence to be able to explain a skill to someone else.”
The Recovery Support Programme approach is scalable too.
“I couldn’t go into all these hospitals, and this training model needed to be scaled,” says Patel, who explains that pharmacists were uniquely placed within hospitals to deliver the model in his stead. For one, a large proportion of the noted errors were prescription-based.
And it worked. Doctors trained by Patel’s team and those who have taken the training model make fewer mistakes. “We trained them to be resistant to all the trauma and all the nonsense around them, to still focus on the task.”
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In the first episode of our special three-part series, the Sixers’ VP of Athlete Care discusses the importance of the performance director’s role in establishing clear communication lines, engendering trust and shaping the team’s culture.
A podcast brought to you by our Main Partners
“The issues I’ve seen here, they’re very rarely – almost never – [a result of] things getting missed,” Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, tells Teamworks’ Director of Athlete Performance Andrew Trimble and Leaders Performance Institute Editor John Portch.
“Where we run into slight problems is everyone trying to do the right thing with really good intentions,” he continues, citing the hypothetical example of three practitioners on the Sixers’ Health & Performance group prescribing the same loading plan to an athlete and inadvertently tripling their load.
“It often comes back to communication and it comes back to this idea of fitting the puzzle pieces to fully support that player.”
It takes mutual understanding and trust between athlete and coach, as Simon touched upon in the recent Teamworks and Leaders Special Report, entitled High Performance Unpacked: Interconnected Performance Teams, and it was a theme he expanded upon in the first episode of our new three-part series.
Elsewhere, Simon also talks about the role of the performance director as a cultural leader [4:00]; the importance of establishing what’s best for the athlete right now [15:30]; the work of the Health & Performance group with external clinicians [34:00]; and how his team can give athletes confidence in their bodies through its joint decision model [55:00].
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
Dr Edd Vahid of the Premier League outlines the importance of a unified purpose, regular feedback and carefully chosen words.
The US President asked him what he did for NASA. “I’m helping to put a man on the Moon,” the janitor replied.
The Leaders Performance Institute is reminded of the moment by Edd Vahid.
“The janitor did not talk about his day-to-day tasks,” says the Premier League’s Head of Academy Football Operations, “but his contribution to the overall mission”.
This famous line resonates with Vahid and, in Leaders’ recent Trend Report, clarity and alignment were both cited as major influences on the quality of leadership by coaches and practitioners across the globe.
“We know that alignment often comes down to the clarity of expectations and that comes from a strong, unified purpose,” said Vahid, who noted that even well-meaning individuals can be drawn into silos without a guiding hand.
The report also revealed that sport is obsessed with the topic and, in the grand scheme of things, does alignment quite well: almost 50 per cent of respondents saw their teams as ‘somewhat aligned’.
“It’s worth noting that the figure sits at about 20 per cent in other sectors,” said John Bull, the Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures, in the report.
There is still room for improvement: only 12.6 per cent said their organisations are ‘well aligned’.
As Vahid explains, teams could start with the following.
Establish a regular and consistent theme
“Alignment is done best when it’s regular and not just your annual ‘here’s what we’re going after, see you again in 12 months’ time,” says Vahid. “It’s got to be constant. In every meeting there needs to be a regular and consistent theme that people are working towards and, importantly, they know their contribution.”
In 2024, Vahid published A Cultural Hypothesis, which explored the factors that enable a sustained culture of success. One element stood out as a ‘super enabler’ for Vahid: cultural leadership. The term acknowledges that leadership exists on three levels within an organisation:
The guardians, Vahid argues, are critical to alignment. “The reality is that if you’re a senior leader, you’re not going to be on the ground, you’re not going to be able to influence every different scenario – that’s where you need your guardians, your foot soldiers on the ground who are able to distil your message and ensure there is direct alignment to the organisation’s aims.”
NASA’s janitor was a cultural guardian in Vahid’s eyes.
Find the right repeatable words
“Language offers you the opportunity for shared understanding,” says Vahid, “and shared understanding is crucial in alignment, so people know what they’re going after. A leader might not necessarily use the word ‘alignment’, but they’ll be talking about their overall purpose.” NASA’s purpose was simple but powerful. “Your language must be repeatable and resonate with people.”
Vahid also says that high-performing organisations tend to have goals that transcend winning. “It’s important to get everyone behind it. Everyone must believe it is attainable, and it must drive them to want to get out of bed in the morning and come to work.”
What if there’s clarity, but still misalignment?
Vahid explains there could be a few factors at play, all of which point to the importance of feedback:
Staff development needs. If a staff member commits an error of execution, it is an opportunity to deliver developmental feedback. Vahid says: “Does everyone understand what we’re going after? If they do and they step outside of that, then feedback is warranted.”
Psychological safety. “It’s a buzz term,” says Vahid of the commonly used phrase, “but it’s crucial for people to feel they are in a feedback culture.” The leader must show that the intent of feedback is to help the individual to progress. “You’re taking time to give them feedback because you care,” he adds. “You’re then seeking to work with the individual to create that development.”
The leader’s behaviour. Leaders must also demonstrate their willingness to listen to feedback. “They need to provide ‘speak up’ signals,” says Vahid with reference to the work of psychologist Megan Reitz. “The leader needs the skill to understand the position they’re in and the power they carry in that dynamic.”
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