Building an Olympic Mindset at Work
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“If you don’t understand yourself and what’s getting in the way of you understanding the world and being the best leader that you can be, you can’t understand other people.” – Lee Povey
In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with high-performance leadership coach Lee Povey on how leaders can cultivate an Olympic mindset.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is a high-Performance Leadership Coach, helping founders, start-ups and teams cultivate an Olympic Mindset. This is a focus on unlocking leadership brilliance through candor and clarity. For more than two decades, he’s worked with Olympic-level performers on the biggest stages in high-pressure environments. And he’s also a former Great Britain & USA cycling champion himself.
Connect with Lee and learn more about his work…
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Russel Lolacher: Here we go, and on the show today we have Lee Povey, and here is why he is awesome. He’s a high performance leadership coach helping founders, startups, and teams cultivate an Olympic mindset. Keep in mind that is a key word here. Those talk in SEO language, we’ll be talking about Olympic mindset a lot today.
This, his focus is on unlocking leadership brilliance through candor and clarity to, of my favorite things for more than two decades, he’s worked with Olympic level performers on the. Biggest stages in high pressure environments. He’s also a former Great Britain and USA cycling champion himself. He knows of what he speaks and he’s here as well.
Hello Lee.
Lee Povey: Hi, good morning.
Russel Lolacher: I love when I have somebody I’m talking to in the same time zone as me. It always makes things a little bit easier. I appreciate that immensely. I.
Lee Povey: Especially when we’re both getting up at 7:00 AM for this.
Russel Lolacher: Yes, yes. And I wish I had more coffee. I will be that. I will say that as well, but still not as bad as it could be. Seven AM’s not horrible. It could be worth but I’m excited still to talk to you.
I’m fueled by anticipation. Before we get into our topic today, which is helping leaders with that and how to, I’m so many, so many questions I have about Olympic mindset and they’re the dark side to that obviously could. Ruminate as well on what’s your best or worst employee experience. Lee, I have to start off with that question.
Lee Povey: Hmm. Thank you Russel. So way, way back when I was going to school, I had dyslexia or I have dyslexia and autism, and I didn’t realize this until very recently. I mean, I knew school was different for me and, and I learned differently from other people. And I got a lot of feedback from the teachers that I was super bright but lazy and I wasn’t lazy.
I just didn’t understand how to learn the way that they needed me to. So I didn’t go to university, which is a typical thing for somebody like me in the uk. So I went into sales, which is what you do, and you’re smart and you have no idea what you’re gonna do in your life. And I got incredibly lucky. So the guy that interviewed me was the area director for the company that I ended up working for.
And. In the interview, he said to me, I never promote, sorry. He said, I never take a manager from another company and bring ’em into my company. I always promote them from inside. So straight off, that was motivational to me of this guy understands that he’s here to develop human beings and the kind of the power of you knowing that in this organization, if I do well and if I try hard, I will be rewarded.
And he was true. He was the youngest ever manager before me. I then took over his mantle as the youngest ever manager for that company. And the reason I want to share this was because, one, how motivational that was to me as a young person to say, right, you will be rewarded if you try hard and do things well.
And then his managerial style for me and he was quite adaptive. Now, looking back now, I still think a lot about him and how he managed people. ’cause he was quite adaptive, so he showed up differently from different people. There was a, another manager who I was kind of a rival with and he, he had a habit of getting himself into silly situations and doing stupid things.
And this guy was pretty hard on him. Like, really? Here’s the boundaries. Kept him in rain for me. He was completely the opposite. He said, whenever you need anything, you call me. Whenever you wanna talk about anything, you have a problem with a member and your team, you come to me for a advice. Otherwise, I’m just gonna trust you and off you go and do well.
So it was seeing how adaptive he was and also seeing how he knew how to turn up for you to get the most out of you. And he understood that I’m very self-sufficient and I like to be left alone. And I’m also. Courageous. If I’m struggling, I’m not gonna hide it. I’ll come and say I’m really struggling. I need help.
And he knew that and he knew how to make me feel comfortable doing that. And I progressed really well under him and had a honestly great experience working there. So I got very lucky. My first corporate job, the guy was great.
Russel Lolacher: Way to set the bar so high for yourself for the rest
Lee Povey: Exactly. I’ve had some disappointments after that. Russel, there’s been some issues.
Russel Lolacher: It’s either one or the other, right? Either you have the most amazing experience when you start and then nobody can reach that level, or you have the worst experience possible, like it couldn’t possibly get any worse. I, I have one question though, and I, I love that they, you know, focused on promoting within and they, that worked for you and they knew you.
I think that’s exemplifying a great leader, is knowing your team individually, knowing what works for them. But I’m always curious when people talk about. Promote within. Did they have a roadmap for you? Like it’s nice for them to say, Hey, we’re gonna promote you. This is what we’re gonna do through, but they don’t necessarily show you how to get to those next levels, to the next level, to the next level.
Did they, in that situation.
Lee Povey: Yeah, very clear roadmap and quite a bit of training and a training officer. It, it, the whole setup was very well done. So it was a large corporate company and they had these areas and this particular area, this guy was the area director for about, I think it would’ve been about 30 or 40 offices of a large corporate company.
And this 30 or 40 offices was a family owned business that had just been bought by the corporate company. So they had all of their own structure in place. The back end of the corporate company, but really still ran like a family business.
Russel Lolacher: I love that I’m talking about the dream Lee. You’re talking about the dream. It’s Fanta, especially for someone that’s probably new and trying to figure this all out because unfortunately, and, and I know you know this, a lot of young staff are then managed by other young staff that don’t have leadership experience, so that just is a recipe for disaster because you’ve got first impressionable employees and you’ve got new managers who’ve never managed before, and then everybody’s supposed to work out okay.
So that’s so important. It’s why fast food places like McDonald’s are great training grounds because there’s such a foundation of expectation as opposed to just throwing you to the wolves. So I love this. I’m gonna, I could go off on that whole conversation, but we’re here to talk about Olympic mindsets when we talked about this as initially as a topic.
’cause obviously this is your expertise. I’m so curious about it because. We talk about burnout, we talk about like this focus on excellence. It’s thrown around in the corporate workspace and nobody even defines what that is. So I’m super curious about your ideas around this from an Olympic side. But before we get into that, I love defining things because I’ve never been an Olympian.
I’ve never been a high class athlete. So when you look at the idea of an Olympic mindset, what are you even talking about when you talk about this?
Lee Povey: Yeah. So to me it’s the aggregation of marginal gains, which is a phrase, coin bud, a British track cycling team. And it’s finding, it’s, it’s looking at everything you do and thinking, how can I do each part of this just a little bit better? And then when you add it together, the gains are quite big and it’s not getting caught in dogma.
So, you know, example, when I moved, when I first moved to America, so I moved from America, from the UK to America 12 years ago. I turned up, at this point I was still a cycling coach. I turned up at the local track and I’m watching a session. I joined in and they were doing this particular warmup. I didn’t think it was an optimal warmup.
So I joined in the warmup and the warmup finished in a race, which is not what a warmup is. A warmup is to get you ready for the training session. And people are trying to win the warmup. I’m like, this is a bit odd. So I spoke to the coach afterwards. I said for what reason? Do you know? Why do you do that type of warmup?
And they were like, oh, that’s what we do here. I’m like, okay, good. But what’s the intent of that warmup? Oh, but that’s the way we do it here. Okay, good. For what reason are you doing this warmup? I wanted them to explain why they were doing the warmup in the way they were and they were not thinking of it like that, so they couldn’t even understand my question ’cause they weren’t thinking, what are we warming up for?
What are we maximizing in this warmup? What’s our focus of the warmup? They were like, this is the way we always warm up. Right. Okay. So I, I want people to stop and go, why am I doing what I’m doing? Why is my business doing what I’m doing? Why am I spending time doing the things that I’m doing? And is there a better way of doing it?
And letting go of the ego of, oh, this is our way. And move into a mindset of we are doing the best we can with the knowledge we have now. And if we get new information and we get new knowledge, we change what we do. And we are not, the way that we do things isn’t our I ideology, you know, after I see that, especially with sports coaches, oh, this is my training method.
Awesome. Well, what happens when a better training method comes out, if that’s your training method? So for me, it’s being adaptable. It’s having that performance mindset of we are here to do the best that we possibly can. It’s knowing when to rest. You know, that’s a huge thing for a lot of corporate clients.
Elite athletes know I need to rest or I don’t improve and I don’t recover. So I’m working with a company at the moment and. The founder of the company, very, very bright guy. I’ve been working with him for quite some time now and he’s doing an active rest period with his company ’cause we’re about to do a bunch of new launches and I just love the way that he framed it in athletic terms of Right.
We’re going to, we’re gonna get all, all non-essential meetings off the calendar right now. I’m gonna give you a couple of extra days this week and next week off and just get you really ready and fresh for this big launch that we’re about to do.
Russel Lolacher: I like that. I like that a lot. I also, you made me think too, when you were talking about adaptability. I, I, I get so frustrated when I hear some leaders talk about, this is my leadership style. I’m like, well, then you’re a horrible leader because you can’t adapt to other leadership style. Not everybody needs to be led in the same way.
And that seems to, that connects that dot For me a question though, when people think of Olympic, and I’ve seen it through some of your language, is talking about high performance. High performance this, high performance that, but. There is this sort of gray area where there’s confusion around what high performance is sort of associated with Olympic mindset, and then this.
Toxic hustle, culture of work, work hard, hard, incremental. What did you do today? What, and you started in sales. Sales is some of the worst areas for that because it’s such a competitive environment, or you’re the bottom three, you’re out this month. Like it is such a a, a intense competitive environment, which doesn’t lend itself to the humanity of leadership.
How do you reconcile and combat that perception in that type of culture?
Lee Povey: Yeah, I, I just wanna go back slightly to what you said at the beginning there. I completely agree. If, if somebody says to me, you know, here’s my leadership style, I already think, well, you’re a stunted leader. Like, there is a limit to what you’re capable of doing. ’cause you can only work with people. Like you and my vision of a, of a great leader is somebody who’s very adaptable, can meet everybody where they’re at, and can change themselves to be able to get the most outta the people they’re working with.
So, yeah, to, to come to this kind of high performance people misunderstand what high performance means. People think that high performance is killing yourself, right? It’s the person who works the hardest. That’s not high performance. High performance is the person who is getting the most from themselves and the sustainable way, and getting the most from others in a sustainable way.
And that means that you’ve gotta enjoy what you do. That means there’s gotta be humor like. There’s nothing I, I’ve not been in environments where there’s more humor than, than Olympic training. Levels or Olympic training systems because it’s so hard. You know, we’re at the track, you’re in the gym in the morning killing yourselves, or you’re track in the afternoon, you’re tired.
We’ll do an effort, we’ll come back and everybody’s ripping into each other between the efforts and having fun because that’s how you motivate yourself and that’s how you kind of get yourself ready for the next moment of pain. And it has to be the same in the workplace. Like there has to be some camaraderie, there has to be some fun.
We’ve gotta feel like we’re in this together and that. Is another part of high performance. And another part of high performance that people miss is the ability to call each other out in a loving way, which is, Hey, is that, is that actually high performance? You, are we really doing the best we can here?
Are you showing up as the best version of yourself here? And for me, you can’t do that. Unless people are able to be kind with each other and empathetic with each other. ’cause otherwise you can’t call each other out in a way that’s actually gonna be impactful. It just feels like bullying rather than I want to be around the best version of you, as opposed to you are doing it wrong.
Russel Lolacher: I, I still feel that ambition is, has to be in there because people are, you wouldn’t be working for that next increment and the next increment if you weren’t motivated, if you weren’t ambitious, but that also doesn’t perpetuate forever. Sustainability and consistency has to be part of it. How do you balance those out with an Olympic mindset?
Lee Povey: So when I think about motivation, I maybe think about this differently from other people. I think media and social media has completely ruined what we think about motivation. You know, you watch the, you watch the sports movie and you’ve got the coach on the sideline shouting and doing the huge motivational speech.
Sure. Okay. But that’s not really what motivates people. Motivation’s intrinsic. ’cause you say it is ambition. It’s like, what do I want from this? Where do I want to go? When I turned up at that real estate agency as a 20-year-old man and I’m having that interview, he said, what do you want? I said, well, I wanna be, what’s the, what’s the best way to get paid here?
He said, become a manager and an area director. Right. I wanna do that. That was a conversation that we had on the interview and that was why I chose that company out of the three that offered me a job because he said that, here’s our pathway, we will promote you from within. So it, it’s setting up a structure that people can understand how they can progress in the company, that they get training, that they get coaching from their leaders, that they get support and they understand, as you said right at the very beginning, what’s the pathway for me in this organization and.
If there isn’t a pathway for that person or you know, their, their role is gonna come to a limit. As a leader, I think we should be developing them still to go onto their next role somewhere else. I think that is great. Leadership is our job, is to be custodians of the people that we’re working with and to help them be the best versions of themselves.
Wherever that led. And wherever that ends up. And I often think that what happens is people try to keep people stuck. ’cause they’re like, they, I’m afraid they’re gonna go. It’s better to get the best from them, to keep pushing them, working with them, inviting them to be the best versions of themselves. And if they leave you, that’s okay.
Because they’ll go out in the world and they’ll talk about you and this company and how great it was like I did with that first manager that I had in real estate and I was like, yeah, anybody else that was in real estate. I was like, go work for this guy. He’s great. And many of my friends did. So I think it’s really important that we, and it’s just good for us to know that we are here to help other human beings.
Most of us work well, thinking that we’re helping other human beings, and it keeps us in connection, which human beings want to be in connection with each other.
Russel Lolacher: It’s not only in wanting to keep staff, it’s also not wanting to go through all the hoops of hiring new staff as well. There’s a lot of leaders that are way too busy to even be leaders, so they are to be fair, so that they’re like, oh, if I just keep them around, that’s. Another three months of having to hire somebody.
I’d rather just put my thumb down on this person and keep them in their role rather than, and and I empathize and I hate it at the same time.
Lee Povey: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: defining success through this Lee? Because I’m thinking of it from the athlete. Is the athlete defining the success of I want to reach the Olympics? Is the coach defining the success?
So, I’m trying to think of it now from an organization standpoint, the employee or the organization.
Lee Povey: Everybody, we’re all in this together, right? So success for an athlete is going to be what they’re capable of doing. Success for the coaches. How many athletes am I producing? What are they going on to do? And when I created Olympic development program, it was myself and an endurance coach. So I run the Sprint program, he run the endurance program.
The first thing we wrote down on our sheet was Make better human beings. The second thing was create Olympic champions. Because my view is if you make better human beings, if you help people be the best versions of themselves actively, rather than just. You know, hope it happened. You actively help people be the best versions of themselves.
You’ll get the most from them, and they’re gonna go on to a more successful life. It’s, it’s a win-win for everybody. And when we’re thinking of elite athletes, if you have a program with say, 50 athletes, you know how many of them are gonna go on to be an Olympic gold medalist? If you get one out of that 50, that’s incredibly good.
So you can’t just have this program of right. You know, it, it, we’re only doing this to, to find Olympic champions. ’cause then the program’s a failure if you don’t find Olympic champion. And that isn’t, that isn’t really what it’s about. It’s finding the best versions of these people so that they can be the best athletes.
And I see exactly the same in the corporate world. Help people be the best versions of themselves. Your company will benefit from it. The people around all will benefit from it. The culture will be much better because of that. And people are gonna enjoy coming to work for you, and people want to come and work for you and then, and the word will get out.
This is a great place to work.
Russel Lolacher: I appreciate you wanting to have build good humans. I think that’s foundational. I mean, I think if you give them the tools and the empathy tools to be able to be, but you have to start with yourself. And that’s a big part of the show is we talk about relationship at work, but the biggest relationship we need to start with is with ourselves.
So if we’re showing up as a leader with an Olympic mindset, what? How do we need to show up? What’s some of the inner work that we need to maybe be focusing on to even be able to. Make this a reality in our workplace.
Lee Povey: Yeah, so one of the things that surprises leaders if they’ve not done this kind of work that I do before is the first thing we focus on is them. So, you know, I go and work there and they’re like, well, I’ve got a problem with this person. I’ve got this issue, and can we sort this issue up? Sure. Let’s talk about you and let’s establish who you are.
So my coaching model is, let’s establish who you are, let’s establish where you want to get to. The leaders, the founders, the CEO, and then what’s the gap between that we need to work on? And then we can look at, okay, now how do you influence other people? And then how do you work with other people?
Because if you don’t understand yourself and what’s getting in the way of you understanding the world and being the best leader that you can be, you can’t understand other people. So I think you’re spot on. It’s this, I have to understand me. What triggers me, what hooks me, what activates me, how I show up in my relationships, how I show up as a leader, how I show up in a relationship to being a leader.
A lot of the founders that I work with are the smartest person in the room. Very, very bright people, very, very capable, can often do any role in their organization as well, if not better than anybody else in the organization. They’re, they’re exceptional human beings, which is why they’re running the startup and scale up companies and.
They’re the issue for the company because they’re getting in the way of the company’s development because they can do everything better than everyone else. So they’ll often step in, take over from somebody and do something, and then the company’s limited by how much time and energy does this person have.
So my job there is to get them to understand. Their disease, you know, their needs to fix things, their, their needs to take over, their need for things to be perfect, their problems with letting go or their, their issues with worthiness, that they can only feel worthy if they’re the hero and they have to step in and do everything.
And if we can work with that, then they get much more comfortable letting other people step up, letting other people grow, letting other people expand their company, which is ultimately what they need. If they’re, if they’re really gonna scale, that’s what they need to be able to do.
Russel Lolacher: I see it from founders for sure. I also see it from the, I call it the Michael Scott problem from the office, right? He was an amazing salesperson and then he got promoted to a leader, and he is not a leader, but he’s an so we lost a great salesperson and gained a horrible leader, so. I know when we talked previously, we were talking about subject matter experts and this aha moment they need to have in order to shift into becoming a leader.
’cause they are not the same thing. I know you’re touching on that. What is that? What is that tipping point for individuals for them to realize that leadership and being the expert on everything is not the same thing.
Lee Povey: Yeah, I mean, let’s take a step back. I think often people get promoted who shouldn’t be promoted because the setup in the company’s incorrect. And what we do is we reward. You just gave the perfect example. We reward the the best sales person by taking ’em out of sales and putting ’em into leadership. So we’ve got our best individual contributor.
We’re taking ’em out of what they do really well, and we’re saying, okay, now the next rung up for you is to be a leader. They may not be suited to being a leader. Not everybody should be a leader, and I, I, the best organizations I see understand that their sales department, you keep your best salespeople in sales and you get different people to come and lead them.
So, you know, that’s, that’s just one thing. And we see this in sport a lot where you get the Olympic champion, the next part of their career, they believe is to become a coach. They may not be suited to be a coach, they might not have the right mindset for it, the right kind of approach for it. And usually they don’t have.
Any training. So that’s one thing that it is a big difference between the corporate world and the sports world. There’s a lot less training in the crossover from being a contributor to being a leader, you know, from being an athlete to being a coach. And that’s often where we see young coaches really struggle and fail and quit sport, is because there isn’t the support there should be.
And the roles are completely different. And it’s the same in sales. You know, your, your top sales person’s gonna be somewhat selfish, very, very driven. And then they’ve gotta give that up and go, how do I support everybody else? Completely different mindset and skillset. So I think this first is worth just noting we don’t choose the right path sometimes for people.
And we put people in positions ’cause they’re ambitious and it’s like, well, why don’t we just pay them more? The top sales person should be earning more than their managers ’cause they’re the person bringing in the most money. And then it’s the manager’s job to, you know, correlate all of them and get them being their best versions of themselves.
So I think there’s that, and then it’s, it is just, we need to give a lot of support to people if we’re gonna invite them into positions of we leadership. What we tend to do, especially in America, is we invite people into positions of leadership. We give them the title of coach. Leader, CEO, and then we think they understand leadership and it’s something you have to learn.
And there’s so much learning if you really wanna be a good leader, there’s so much learning. I’m naturally a leader. It’s never been a problem for me to step up and take responsibility, which is, for me, a big part of leadership is I will. I’ll take responsibility for this. I’ll make the decisions. But then the problem with people like me is you think you have to have all of the answers.
You think you have to be the smartest person in the room the whole time instead of, how am I leveraging everybody else in this room, in this organization to make our decisions smarter? Than I can do by myself. And also if I’m always the smartest person in the room, I’m telling everybody else they’re the dumbest person in the room.
So how do we invite them into being, feeling like everybody’s smart here and everybody has a worth here, instead of dimming their light, turning their light up so that I can get the most out of them.
Russel Lolacher: And how do we look at that for ourselves though, because I, I completely agree with everything you’re saying, but it also feels like the system’s broken, and I wanna talk about culture a bit later. But right now I want to kind of understand, as a leader, how am I becoming more self-aware that I might be the part of the problem?
I’m not a great leader, but ego generally gets in the way, or imposter syndrome will get in the way on both sides of that spectrum. So how do I figure it out for myself? Because unfortunately, a lot of leaders have to lead themselves through this.
Lee Povey: Yeah. Well, you get somebody like me, ideally, I mean, that’s the value of a coach, right? The value of a coach is we can see the stuff that you can’t see right now. And when I think about coaching, you know, take it back to my cycling days. When I was first a coach, I thought I have to have all the answers and these people have gotta rely on me.
And by the end of my coaching career, it was completely different. I thought my job was to make them know so much about cycling or to help them, not make them, help them know so much about cycling themselves. The sport that if I got food poisoning on the day of the Olympics and I couldn’t go to the track side, they’re gonna perform just as well.
And I, and that’s how I see leadership. My job is to help you be the best version of yourself. So you don’t need me. That doesn’t mean that I’m useless, and this is where many leaders get it wrong, is they think they need to be needed. You know? And especially they need to be liked, and they need to be needed rather than, my job here is to support you being the best version of yourself.
And that takes some confidence and that takes, you know, feeling good about yourself so that you can let go of needing to prove yourself the whole time. And this is what we often see in young leaders is this, I must prove myself. It’s the hero’s journey where if you look at the, you know, the male archetype parent and the female.
Archetypes, archetypes of mature leadership. It’s the king and the queen, and the king and the queen enable everybody around them to be the best versions of themselves. They’re not off doing the quest anymore, right? They’re the ones that are enabling everybody else to be the best versions of themselves, and this is what we want.
We want leaders that are like, how do I help you be the best version of yourself rather than, how do I keep showing you I’m smarter than you or more capable than you?
Russel Lolacher: How comfortable are we? I already know the answer to this, but I don’t know the degree. How comfortable are we going to need to get with failure? Because Olympic mindset is Sure. Success. Success. We think Olympic, we think medals, but there’s so many failures along the way and.
Lee Povey: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: We as individuals, nevermind culture, but we as individuals are afraid of it.
So how do we right that wrong from an Olympic side, side, mindset
Lee Povey: Yeah. We completely reframe it as as to it’s a learning experience. That’s it. And I, I, I think you’re completely right, Russel. We think about learning experiences as failure instead of, well, I learned by doing that, I think it was Thomas Edison, that when he was asked about the light bulb, said, well, I, I learned 99 ways how not to do it.
’cause it took him a hundred tries to, to perfect a light bulb that worked. But he got there and this is what we need to be thinking about is right. Well, I try this and see what happens, and I used to see a lot of this in sport. I’ve done a particular type of training. It’s got me to this level, so I wanna keep doing the same type of training, or the chances are you’re gonna have to do a different type of training to get you to the next level, and then a different type of training to get you to the next level because you’ve got to force an adaptation.
And it’s the same in companies. What we did to get here. Is unlikely to get us to go here. I’m working with a company at the moment that’s getting ready to be acquired and they, they’ve had to change some internal systems with some feedback from firms that may be interested in buying them. ’cause they say, well, that was great, that got you to here, but we want you to be this size.
This system needs to be different. Your internal processes need to be different. And they’re, and this is, you know, they’re really smart leaders and they’re like, brilliant. Thanks for the feedback. Let’s change what we’re doing. They’re not resistant. They’re like, yes, that’s right. That is the pathway for us to get to the next level.
So it’s been that. Level of adaptability that you can look at what you’re doing, even if it feels like it’s working or even if it is working to go up. But that’s not gonna get us to the next level or the next version of us. Here’s a crossing point where we need to adapt and change, and that means we’ve just gotta be comfortable with things aren’t always gonna be great.
Sometimes we’re gonna be learning, sometimes we’re gonna be having experiences. Sometimes we’re gonna be, things aren’t gonna go the way that we want them to. But if we’re not willing to push that envelope, we will only stay where we are. There’s no way that we can expand, get better, get bigger scale without taking some risks and without being willing to fail.
And the problem as humans is when we think about failure, we tend to make it catastrophic. Is that the way you say that word? Yeah. Catastrophic. Thank you. And when we go to the, okay, what’s the worst case scenario? Instead of what’s the most likely scenario, which is, okay, we make this mistake, we backtrack, we try a different way, instead of, we make this mistake, the company is doomed.
We’ve all lost our jobs. And, and it’s. Good leaders take that pressure off their employees and they say, go, take, go, go learn, go experience something, go try some different things and come back to me. Go try a product you know, research it. Let’s see what it, it’s like, you know, I work with companies that make products for consumers.
They’re always iterating and trying things, and they’ll try something. They’ll go down an avenue and they’ll come back and they go, we tried that. It wasn’t right. We couldn’t get it to work properly. It didn’t taste right, whatever it was. Okay, let’s try something else. That’s what the process should be.
Russel Lolacher: How do we bring this Olympic mindset into our teams? Because we’re doing the work, we’re understanding that there’s this incremental work we need to do every day failure. We’re embracing it, but then we’re working with a diverse team of individuals who may be coming with different cultural backgrounds that have different views on all of these things, Lee, so how are we introducing this into a larger framework?
Lee Povey: Candor, I think is really important and, and, and the skill of feedback is really important. So often when, when I get called into a company and I start, typically I’ll, I’ll, I’ll interview a bunch of people in the company, get a feel for the company, what’s going on, maybe do a 360 of the leaders, and when we’re in that process.
What I often hear from kind of, newer startup scale up companies that are typically might, the, the type of companies I’m working with are typically doing well, but they’re not really set up for the next level of scaling up and success. And that’s why I’m getting caught called in. And as I mentioned earlier, that founder is probably hanging on a bit too tight.
So I get called in and one of the first things I see is. The level of feedback isn’t good enough, so people are not being given enough feedback and the quality of the feedback is not good enough. So one of the early things I do is workshops on how to give feedback, because people are afraid to give feedback, yet they desperately want feedback.
And I’ll hear things like, oh, I’m worried I’m gonna get fired. And I’m like, okay, what makes you. Concerned that you’re gonna get fired. I just don’t hear anything from my boss, so I don’t know how I’m doing. And then I go and speak to the leadership team and they’re like, oh, we’ve got this great team and they’re really doing well.
I’m like, well, they don’t know that.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah.
Lee Povey: So I think feedback is a huge part of high performing teams. You’ll see this in the military, you’ll see this in in high level sports teams. The feedback is so important and people aren’t afraid to give feedback because they know that feedback is vital for progression.
You have to be talking about what’s working, what’s not working, how you are showing up, how I’m showing up, and there’s a lot less. Concern and ego about sharing feedback with each other and they get really, really good at it. So that’s something that I work on a lot with companies is what’s your feedback like, how are you delivering feedback?
And the reason I’m so good at doing these workshops is ’cause I was so bad at it. I was terrible at giving feedback from a young age. You know, one of my gifts is I can see how to make things better. I’ve always understood how things can be improved, and the approach I would take is just to tell people you’re not doing it very well, and here’s how you should do it instead.
Now, when you go up to an athlete a velodrome and you walk up to ’em and you say, Hey, why are you doing it like that? Why don’t you do it like this Instead? You’d be so much faster. That doesn’t get you rapport. Typically that person reacts. Badly or tells you to get lost. And even if they just kind of nod their head, they’re not listening.
So I realized, hey, I’m not being effective here. And honestly, my, one of the things I like most in the world is to leave things better than I found them, whatever it is. I’ve always been highly motivated by that, much more than by money. I like to improve things and I want to share like. Here’s what I see, and here’s how the world could be better.
So I’ve had to learn if I wanna be effective, I’ve had to learn how to give feedback in a way that’s actually effective and actually matters. And people, it gets people on your side rather than pissing people off. So I’ve learned the hard way and really studied, right? How do we give feedback? How do we make feedback really impactful so that person walks away with something they didn’t have before the conversation.
Russel Lolacher: When it comes to things like feedback, communication, which I think is a huge key part of what we’re talking about here as well. How does it work when, so I’m thinking the Olympic mindset and I’m thinking the Olympics. There are team sports and there are individual success sports. So how do we balance that in the workplace as a leader?
We’re approaching our team. Are we looking at as a team success? Are we looking at individuals success to move the team forward? I’m just, again, I’m trying to think of that athletic analogy of how do we approach this as a coach.
Lee Povey: Yeah, in modern sport, there’s no such thing as an individual sport. You might have one person compete in, in the a hundred meters by themselves. There’s a team behind them helping them get there. So we, you know, it’s, it is like the, the oh, it is like the fallacy of the self-made person. There is no self-made person.
Everybody had somebody who helped them get to where it was. You know, whether it’s a parent, a teacher, a family member, a, a first boss who helped ’em understand things, an investor, everybody has had support. There is nobody who has. Pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, which is the stupid thing anyway.
’cause if you pull your bootstraps, you fall over. So it’s like there’s nobody that’s done that. So I think it’s really in a team organization. The leaders need to be looking at this person and think, what motivates this individual? How do I tap into that so that I can get this individual motivated? And as I said earlier, motivation’s intrinsic.
You can motivate people by. Threatening to kill them or by starving them. And that’s it. You can’t motivate. You can’t motivate someone to do something they don’t want to do just because you ask them to. Money’s not enough. People will stay for money for a period of time, but eventually money won’t be enough.
So really what we’ve gotta tap into is what motivates them as a human. And I believe the way to do that is to have a clear mission for the company so that they understand what the mission for the company is, and then a clear role for them with lots of feedback so they understand how their role fits into the mission, and they’re getting feedback on here’s how you impact what we do, and to pay them fairly.
We don’t need to be paying them more than anybody else, but we wanna make sure that we’re paying them fairly compared to what they could get elsewhere. I think if we hit those three things, that’s a really good start and that’s a good way of getting people motivated and invested in what they’re doing.
They’re getting feedback on how you’re showing up. They have a growth plan so they know what’s there. Opportunity to grow if they want to grow. And not everybody does. Like not everybody wants to be a leader. Some people are like, Hey, I found my position and I just wanna be really good at this. And growing for them is being a better version of themselves in that particular role.
And I think we should never downplay that. When I first work with founders, what tends to happen is they’re like, Lee, these people don’t get it. You know, they can’t work 120 hours a week. They don’t care. It’s like they’re, they’re not like you. You are the freak, not them. Right? You are the unusual one, not them.
So how do we leverage what you are capable of while understanding what the majority of the business is gonna be like and what the majority of the people who are gonna work with you are going to be like. And companies don’t particularly do, or don’t typically do well when we have 30 people with the founder.
Mindset in them, right? We want some leaders, we want some followers. We want some people that know their place and are happy with their place. And then what we wanna do is maximize what we get from those people. And I believe we maximize in that by giving them a great experience where they want to come to work and they want to work for you, and they want to be the best version of themselves, and they get rewarded for being the best versions of themselves.
And that reward isn’t just financial, it’s emotional. Told what they’re doing well, they get told where the opportunity gaps are for them. And you help them get there.
Russel Lolacher: When I think of athletes as well though, they also are constantly training for years. For a moment, like they are always putting in the work for this. One thing that might happen, might not happen down the road. Where’s resiliency in this, in the workplace? If I’m a leader in a team and we’re incrementally moving, but the success, quote unquote, success might not be down the road and they’re not seeing those immediate results, maybe that’s a quicker way of saying it.
How do we keep them? To your point, you don’t like motivation in, in the way that says, but there still needs to be something purpose wise. Is it, is it the vision and mission? You, you mentioned mission, but I know so many organizations that have horrible ones and visions that are just sort of, you know, either 17 pages of what a vision is or that don’t make any sense.
I’m just, I’m guess I’m trying to connect the dots between this incremental. Success that may not come, people may come and go by the time success reaches. How do you align that with an organization versus athletics?
Lee Povey: Look, we see companies succeed with poor vision, with poor missions, with poor leadership just ’cause they have some talented people there, or somebody’s come up with a really good idea just as we see athletes succeed that aren’t training optimally, but they’re just really, really gifted. Now, typically in today’s world, these people eventually get caught out.
So got the Tour de France going on right now. There’s an athlete in that Ade Pcha. He won the Tour de France on his first try. I don’t know if anybody else has ever done that. Unbelievable talent. Typically, you know, the Tour de France is one of, if not the hardest endurance sporting event that humans do.
And. He won, I think he was 21 or 22. We tend to hit our physical endurance maturity in our late twenties. So shows you how unbelievably gifted this kid was. Then another team came in with another athlete of a similar level. Probably not quite as gifted, but very close. Jonah’s Vigar and, and the team.
Was much better run, much more effective, much more optimized. And Ade. CIA won his first two tour De Frances and then lost the next two because his other team came in and just did it better than them. Now, ADE was probably the more gifted. Athlete, and I think he’s gonna show that. And he won last year’s tour de France, and I think he’s gonna win this year’s Tour de France.
But he had to go away and look at everything he did. There’s a good interview with him, with Peter Atia on Peter Atias podcast. And he had to go away and look at everything he did, everything he does, and reassess it and go, oh God, how do I do this better? And I think, you know, as organizations we gotta look at what can we do differently and how do we support everybody in what they’re doing?
How can we do it better? And it’s also coming back to, you know, you said athletes are training and have this like one big competition, but there’s thousands of other competitions they’re doing that get them there. So they’re constantly trying things, they’re constantly getting out there practicing competition.
And that’s what, that’s what the workplace is. We’re constantly trying things, we’re constantly getting tested and then we go back and we analyze it. I think. Coming back to, and I kind of missed it when we were talking about feedback. For me, the most effective people in the world are the ones that are best at self analyzing themselves and analyzing and debriefing in groups.
So my favorite thing as a cycling coach was my athlete would go and do a race. They’d come back. So I was a sprint coach that a race is, are less than a minute. They go do their race, they come back. We have these rollers that they warm down on after the race, and once they’ve done their warm down, I go up to ’em.
How was the race? Then they will tell me their experience of the race. Well, this is what happened. What did you learn? What would you have done differently? I’m getting them to analyze themselves and critique themselves, and then I will add what they’ve missed and I’ll be like, oh, did you think of this? Or, how about this?
Or, let’s try this next time. And that for me is where the joy is in world is we go and try things. And then we come back together and we talk about what we’ve done. We analyze it, and then we say, right, how can we go and do this better? That is high level performance for me. That is where the pinnacle is, is we do it, we debrief, we go and try it again.
That’s the Olympic mindset. How do I do this better? How do I analyze what I’ve done? How do I think about what we’ve done? How do I go and try something else? Or how do I optimize what we’ve done?
Russel Lolacher: So let’s pull back a bit within the larger organization. So as leaders with Olympic mindset working with their teams, that’s certainly one thing, but we are not an island. We generally are working within a larger culture, larger millions of subcultures. What are some practices and policies that you’d like to see, or should organizations should have in place in order to support? This type of work, this Olympic mindset, this, this type of high performance mindset.
Lee Povey: I think you need a culture of asking questions is okay. I think you need a culture that leaders can be vulnerable and by vulnerable, I mean they can say, I don’t have the answer to that. Let me think about it. Let me go away. Or why don’t we both research this, or why don’t you go away and research it and come back to me and teach me.
And we have this horrible media that says, look, leaders have to be geniuses and know the answers. And Steve Jobs was the genius and he did everything, and it’s just not true. And I dunno why we kind of glorify that version of leadership. ’cause it’s not leadership and it isn’t actually what you see when you go into these organizations.
What you see is hundreds and thousands of really talented people working on things together, trying things, failing, trying things, failing, succeeding, coming back. Giving each other feedback. That’s real leadership. That’s real high performance. So I think it’s from the top as the very top, you know, whoever’s in charge saying, this is the way that we work here.
And we work with a model of it’s okay to admit you’ve got something wrong. It’s okay to say I’m struggling. It’s okay to say I don’t understand this. In the pursuit of we just wanna do it better. ’cause otherwise what you get is people saying they don’t admit they can’t do something and then they go down these horrible roads where they do completely fail.
’cause they’ve never put their hand up to say, I don’t understand, or I, I’m not sure what we’re doing here. Or This doesn’t feel right. So it’s having that culture of mistakes are okay. I mean, not, not like making mistakes all the time, but it’s like, it’s okay to try things. It’s okay to be adventurous. It’s okay to be courageous, and it’s okay to talk when that doesn’t work and when it does work and why it works and, and just so much more communication about what it is that we’re trying to do and where we’re trying to get.
So everybody feels like they’re part of something instead of, as you said, all these little silos. I have no idea what I’m doing and how does it compare to what the mission of the organization is?
Russel Lolacher: I, I love that you brought back that sometimes we have people in leadership positions who aren’t leaders, and I think that’s one of the bigger challenges we have is that we throw the word leadership around. Far too easily. Oh, we have a leadership team. I can count nine of those 10 people who have never led anything in their life.
They’ve never made anybody better, but because of the title they have. So how do we change that from an Olympic, from Olympic mindsets? So I wanna go actually, even. Hiring is what I’m thinking of right now. Because if we want the right people, we want the people that are actual leaders to move through the organization to get those executive, it needs to start with hiring at any level.
How do we implement an Olympic mindset right there in the hiring process?
Lee Povey: So when, one of the things I was really well known for as a cycling coach was I was really good at spotting talent.
Russel Lolacher: Hmm.
Lee Povey: And I think I was good at spotting talent ’cause I could look at somebody, I could see where they were now, and I could think, and I could understand how much more optimization there was available for them and therefore how much room they had to grow.
And we used to call this headroom. How much headroom does that athlete have? And you can look at two athletes and let’s say they do, you know, one of the events in cycling is a flying 200 meters. So you’re on the velodrome, you fly down from the top of the velodrome, go around the bottom of the velodrome, and you have your last 200 meters timed.
And that’s your entry to the sprint competition. That’s your seeding for the sprint competition. And you can look at two athletes and let’s say they both do 11 seconds. Dead, which is good for a 15, 16-year-old athlete, and one of them has all of the arrow gear on the latest bike, the best wheels and tires possible.
Their riding position is excellent, and the other one has like old equipment, doesn’t have any good ear arrow gear. Then riding position isn’t quite right. They look ragged. They’re both doing the same time. I want the kid that looks ragged and I’m gonna take that kid, I’m gonna say, right, what happens when we optimize you like this kid?
Then where are you gonna be? And I think of this the same when we’re employing people, often we get hooked in. I mean, we can talk about interviewing and how bad humans are interviewing. And basically all we do is we employ people that we like. And how do, how do we do that? It’s, we employ people who are more like us rather than people who are more.
Able to do the job. But I, I, I think of this in the interviewing process of looking at people who we think, Hey, that person’s got a lot of headroom. There’s a lot of potential there. There’s a lot of room for growth. And if I bring that person in and we look after them as leaders and we help them grow, they have this potential to really flourish rather than someone I’m like, I think they’re hitting their limiter in this position.
And that’s. Probably all of they’ve got. So I always look for people that are curious, that want to understand that have room to grow into a position. I don’t care about age. I’m 52 and I’m still learning just as much now as I was when I was 21. I’m on my fourth career. So personally, I don’t care about age.
I care more about how curious is this person, how willing to learn, are they? How, how undefended are they? Are they defensive every time I ask ’em a question or are they open or are they, I don’t know the answer to that. What do you think? Right. That’s what I’m looking for when I’m interviewing somebody.
I’m looking for potential.
Russel Lolacher: Also, I guess to back to that failure comment is how do they embrace failure? How do they look at failure? Because I can see people in interviews never wanting to even mention the word failure. ’cause I’ve seen people talk about their careers and you wouldn’t think they ever did anything wrong, ever. They got every job they ever applied for.
They just, it’s this perfect, you know, world that they live in. ’cause they want to put their best face forward. They don’t wanna be vulnerable, especially in a, in a situation like a hiring process where one side of the panel has a hell of a lot more power than the person that wants the job. So they don’t lean into that humanity, the vulnerability, which actually makes them better suited for the job anyway.
Lee Povey: A and, and we will get you more rapport with the interviewers because I bet the person sitting there has failed. And when you talk about your failure and you talk about it with some humility, you know, the, it’s, it is that question of, you know, what’s the worst thing about you? Oh, the worst thing about me is I’m just known for working too hard and, you know, okay.
Russel Lolacher: I am a perfectionist. Oh, I’m the worst.
Lee Povey: I, I, I just, you know, I just try too hard and I just do too much, and I take on too much responsibility. That’s what everybody says about me. You know, I, I, I think when you’re on an interview, so for people listening to our interviewing, having humility, being able to talk about your failures and what you learnt from them.
To me makes you a very attractive candidate. That candidate that just can’t say, oh, I’ve never failed. Well then I don’t trust you. And also I don’t think you’re courageous ’cause you’re not trying hard enough. You’ve never failed. You are not trying hard enough to push forward to learn. You know, athletes fail all the time.
Athletes make mistakes all the time. And you have to make the mistakes to learn. The other thing I wanted to bring us back to that we’ve not mentioned yet, is this ethos of the Olympic mindset is. Focus on the process and the results who take care of themselves. So what I see, you know, a lot with young athletes and sports coaches is they’re focused on the winning.
Winning is actually out of your control. We think we can control winning. We can’t. We can’t control winning in sports and we can’t control winning in business. You know, if somebody can come along with a better idea than you with more funding than you, they’re gonna end up being a better company than you.
So you can’t control that. But what you can control is what are you capable of doing? What is it that you are doing to be the best version of yourself? So taking us back to that aggregation of marginal gains, what is it that I’m doing to be a better version of myself today than I was yesterday? That’s all I want from you as a leader.
That’s all I want from you. As somebody who supports leaders, that’s all I want is you are getting up and thinking, how can I be a better leader today? Coming back to your statement of people that move into leadership, given the title of leader, and then just think they’re a leader. Nobody, there’s so much that you need to learn.
There’s so much involved in it, and the best leaders are the ones that take that with reverence and go. I’ve been given this title, now I need to earn the title. Right? You don’t deserve it ’cause you’ve been given it. You deserve it because you’ve earned it and by your actions. And that is, what am I doing to show up as a leader for the people around me?
How am I showing up as a leader for myself? How am I showing up to be a better version of myself so that I can connect better with the people around me? How am I creating systems? How am I creating cultures that these people can thrive in? Rather than just, I’m telling you how to do it and you better do it.
And that’s what we see from a lot of leaders is they think that leadership is, now I’m in charge. I tell people what to do. The best leaders I work with very rarely tell people what to do. They invite people in, they invite their voice, they invite the best version of themselves, and even when we’re doing targets, for me, the most effective way to do a target is the person you’re working with.
What do you think your target should be? Now you as a leader know what their target needs to be, right? You have an idea of where we need to go, what we need from them. But you are asking them because you want their buy-in, you want them to feel like they’ve created it, and then you steer them, you know, for an athlete, right?
So they want to do a nine second, 200 meters, which is gonna get them to the Olympic championships. They’re currently doing 12 seconds. And you say, okay, what’s your target for the year? And they go like, nine, five. I don’t think you’re gonna drop two and a half seconds in a year, but, but. I love it and I love the enthusiasm.
Let’s put some stepping stones in. Let’s just go for 11 five first and then reevaluate so that you are guiding that person on what their goal should be because you have an understanding of it, but you want them to really feel bought into it and that they’ve taken time to think about what do I need to do to get to where I want to get to, and what are the stepping stones for me if we take care of the process.
So if I do the right exercises in the gym, I do the right stuff on the bike. I look after my position on the bike, my tactics, my aerodynamics, it will all come together for me to be the best version of myself. If I turn up on race day as the best version of myself and I get beaten by somebody else, that’s all I can do.
I’m not disappointed and I’ve lost races. And been really happy about my performance and proud of myself and that’s the best I can do. I’ve won races where I was clearly the better athlete and been really disappointed ’cause I executed really poorly and I got kind of got lucky with winning or I just won because I was so much more of a gifted athlete.
So I wanted to be looking at the process and rewarding ourselves for good process, not rewarding ourselves for the results and. As I’ve seen in business, in life, in relationships, in sport, if you do that, the result takes care of itself.
Russel Lolacher: Right, and to normalize this in an organization as opposed to having that one team and that one leader working in this way. That. ’cause that happens where they find this secret formula and everybody else wants to work for that one team, but everybody else is like, why are they so successful? And then they continue to do something else entirely.
So normalizing that within a larger environment, a larger culture from leadership at the top. Absolutely. So I like wrapping it up with the a question of if somebody’s listening and they’re really intrigued by everything
Lee Povey: let’s, let’s hope somebody is listening. Russel,
Russel Lolacher: Oh, at least three. My mom is definitely listening.
Lee Povey: my mom probably too. Hi, mom.
Russel Lolacher: What’s something they can do tomorrow? Because I mean, they’re not, I, I’m sure they’re not gonna go full, you know, full hog, I guess for a horrible metaphor. What do you think would be the first couple of steps or first step they could do tomorrow to start the process of going, I want to try this different way of thinking.
Lee Povey: The first thing is you have to understand yourself, so, work with somebody like me and, and this isn’t an advert. I’ve worked with people like me. Every athlete has worked with a coach. We know it’s the right thing to do as sports people. Yet for some reason we haven’t quite figured that out in the workplace.
Get a teacher, get a coach, get a mentor, and they’re different things, right? So teachers teach you how to do that thing. A coach helps you understand yourself and your pathway where you want to get to, and helps you lay out that pathway. And a mentor shares from their experiences, this is how I did it, this is what I’ve seen other people do, and they’re not.
Necessarily getting you to understand yourself better. They’re just sharing, here’s my experience. This is what I did. Take from it what you want. So get more people into your world. Get coaches, teachers, and mentors into your world. That is, you have to have that if you’re gonna be a better version of yourself, and then start with that question of.
How can I be a better version of me? What’s getting in the way? How do I sharpen conflict with others? ’cause that’s a really good clue as to what’s getting in the way of our relationships. What relationships do I need to foster? What is it that I need to understand and learn about myself to be able to sharp better for other human beings?
So take myself, going back to school, right? I was always told I was really gifted. So I’ve used my intelligence through my life to control things, to make myself feel safe, especially when it came around my autism, which I’m only you know, discovered a couple of years ago. I’m really kind of unpacking, but there’s certain situations I don’t feel comfortable in.
So I’d use my intelligence to control the situation and people so that I could feel safe as an adult. People don’t like being controlled as a kid, it’s okay, right? And it gets you through your family system. But as an adult, people don’t like being controlled. So I have to understand what is it about me that I need to protect to look after?
Be it energy levels, be it noise, be it light. What are the things that I have to be aware of that are going to affect me and my performance so that I take responsibility for that and I don’t put that on others, and that I can show up how they need me to show up. We started this conversation right at the beginning with something that is really important I want people to take away, which is your job as a leader is to be a custodian of the people in your charge.
That’s leadership. You’re looking after their welfare. You’re looking after their ability to progress. You’re looking after the culture and making sure everybody actually enjoys what they’re doing because we work much. Better when we enjoy it. Human beings are designed to enjoy what they do. And it is knowing that and then it’s also being adaptable.
And I think that’s so important. I really want people to take this away. If you think you have a leadership style, you are a very limited leader. ’cause you can only work with the people that work with your style. And I saw this with sports coaches all the time, and I think it’s our job as leaders to go, how do I meet this person where they’re at?
How do I know the person that wants to. Have to kick up the butt, right? Come on buddy, let’s do this. You can do this. And how do I know the person that needs to be left alone? If somebody comes up to me and says, you can do this, it just pisses me off. I am more motivated than anybody you’ll ever meet. I’m more competitive than anyone you’ll ever meet.
So when you start to kind of push that, you’re just gonna get pushed back from me, like, go away. I don’t need it. That’s now getting in the why. Whereas if somebody says to me, Lee, I trust you. Come to me when you have problems, let’s talk about it. Let’s analyze it. Go and do it. I’m off to the races and I will come back to them and I’ll say, Hey, I’m thinking about this, or I’m thinking about that.
What do you think about that? I love those conversations with somebody that I believe is open-minded if somebody’s just telling me what to do, especially if they’re not as smart as me, unbelievably demotivating. For me, one of the reasons why I work for myself.
Russel Lolacher: Thank you very much for that, Lee. That is Lee Povey. He’s a high performance leadership coach, former cycling champion himself. And the pre, the preacher, that doesn’t sound great. The advocate of Olympic mindset. Let’s go with that. The advocate of Olympic mindset and helping us shift in that direction as well.
Thank you so much for being here, Lee.
Lee Povey: Thank you Russel. Really enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate you getting me on.