This article is written by Paul Boston, Business Advisor, Leadership Development at Ontario Public Service and Endurance Athlete.

The problem: Leaders are now facing a lot of unknowns, rapid changes and leading people and teams in a new hybrid workplace.

Why it matters: This has caused a significant amount of pressure on leaders, and a high level of employee and leadership turnover.

The solution: Leaders need to learn a new way of performing and leading people based on human performance science.

2022 is winding down and leaders in the public service are now moving into a lot of unknowns such as global economic uncertainty, another wave of COVID-19 and the ever changing workplace. On top of these unknowns, leaders are still feeling burned out from all the previous waves of COVID-19, longer working days from home and not being able to separate their work lives. We started to witness a large number of leaders resigning from their positions just because they had enough. This is now called the “great resignation” in which a lot of organisations lost their leadership teams and were left scrambling to replace these leaders at a significant cost in time and resources. As an elite level endurance athlete, I will share some insights on the human performance skills that I acquired racing at the world level. These are the skills leaders are starting to learn about and apply as the world emerges from the global pandemic.

Understanding human performance 101

Early on in my athletic career, I had a coach who introduced me to the Yerkes-Dodson Law of Performance. The model looks at the relationship between performance and arousal (see HRB Are You Too Stressed to Be Productive? Or Not Stressed Enough?). It states that we tend to underperform if we get too little or too much mental arousal or stress. Working directly with leaders over most of my career, what I have noticed is that they spend too much time in the over-arousal state, leading to burnout and high turnover of some highly talented people. Why is this important for leaders to understand? Because it sets the leadership and performance context of what leaders need to start implementing now, to lead people, teams, and organisations in our new world. Below are some strategies you can start to use to help create a human performance workplace for yourself and the people around you.

Human performance skills for leaders

Human performance skills are the skills that allow leaders to be both an optimal and a high-performing leader. These skills have been used by high-performing athletes for decades and are now starting to be embedded into organisations as part of their wellness and performance strategies and programs.

Strong sense of self-awareness

Leaders who invest time developing a strong sense of self-awareness know when they have been in a high-performance zone too long and start feeling themselves slipping into the burnout zone. By using skills like mindfulness, they know they can function in the optimal performance zone for longer periods of time and know when to focus their energy and time when a high-performance state is required. So, if you have not already developed a daily mindfulness routine, this might be the starting point for you, such as getting away from your desk for 15 minutes at lunch for a mindful walk or a 12-minute meditation break during the day.

One simple thing a leader can do is to ensure their people are getting the rest they need during the week and throughout the year.

Leveraging team members' strengths

Despite what we see on TV when watching individual athletes, there is a whole team behind them that helped to get them there and keep them performing at their best. Very similar to when we only “see” the leader of an organisation, and not the talented team behind them.

When I raced as a triathlete, I had top notch sports medicine doctors, a physiotherapist, coaches, a massage therapist, and a nutritionist who enabled me to reach a world level of performance. In the workplace, I am often amazed by leaders’ lack of awareness and knowledge of the talent they have working around them. So taking the time to discover the strengths in people, and then using those skills to help you and them achieve personal and organisational objectives will allow you as the leader to spend more time in your optimal performance zone, where you can spend more time on quality work while avoiding being at risk of burnout.

Motivation and rest

Often, I refer to motivation and rest as MR. I ask leaders: what are your MR levels like? Why? Because it’s a great snapshot of how they are currently performing and going to perform. I had a coach who was so attuned to the team's rest and recovery factor that when he asked us questions and heard our explanatory style change to negative or reactive, he knew we needed more time to recover from a high-performance moment either in training or in competition. One simple thing a leader can do is to ensure their people are getting the rest they need during the week and throughout the year.

Human performance is very dynamic. As a leader, a simple act of discovering the relationship between arousals, stressors, and performance can help you develop the skills you and your organisations need and start to create the human performance culture necessary for the modern day workplace.

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