Navigating Success - at What Cost?

I love sport. I play sport. I watch sport. I enjoy sharing stories about sports! It’s like talking about the weather or traffic with a relative you haven’t seen for a while - it’s comfortable, familiar, habitual.

As a casual spectator, and having spent much of my childhood enjoying sporting activity, I’ve come to reflect on how these lived experiences have informed some of my values and beliefs around the meaning of success.

An uncomfortable truth for me about sport is a prevailing culture about ‘winning at all costs’ that often feels intertwined with high-performance. More and more incredible, talented people have taken the courageous step of sharing the impact this culture has had on them and their participation – the likes of Simone Biles, Ben Stokes and Naomi Osaka to name a few.

In the last couple of years, inspired by the writing of Cath Bishop (a former Olympic rower herself) I’ve been encouraged by a growing movement to redefine what success might look and feel like in sport.

Cath highlights the approach taken by Olympic swimmer Kieren Perkins, who took over as CEO of the Australian Sports Commission, who said:

“If we just want to win, and we’re happy just putting people into the meat grinder and seeing how many kids survive to get gold medals … fine, I can buy gold medals, that’s not hard….but I think we can do better than that”.

As someone who works with leaders and talks about culture and performance, I’m fascinated by how we individually define success in the workplace outside of sport.

Take a moment to consider what success looks like for you in your role. In striving for it, how can you ensure that you find the right balance between addressing your performance and being fair in your expectation of your performance?

Stephen Covey describes the need to have the ‘right map’. If you’re holding the wrong ‘map’ in terms of the values you hold around what it means to be successful, then however hard you try to navigate that map by changing your attitude and behaviours, you may still end up lost.

When did you last check your map?