A psychologist's thoughts on the Tour De France

This isn’t a post just for cycling lovers.  As you can see on the left, I enjoy getting out on two wheels whenever I can.  However, I’ve just spent three weeks watching the biggest international event in professional cycling, and I have some thoughts on what I saw and how it relates to the world of business.  Here are my (slightly) random thoughts.

It’s about teamwork.  The cyclists cover thousands of miles across France, and at the end of the race there can only be one winner.  However, it’s impossible to imagine anyone being successful over such a long trial without the backing of their team.  Wheels need to be changed; drinks need to be brought up.  Sometimes a rider sacrifices their own bike to pass it to another member of their team whose bike has crashed and who has a better chance of winning.  If you can’t maintain the support of your team you will never win.

Respect differences.  The Tour De France is a race for all types.  Some of the racers are lean little whippets who excel at sprinting away on the flat.  Some cyclists are powerhouses of muscle who get away from the pack on the long hills.  Each team has a balance of people who are best at different things, and they had better understand and respect each other for their different contributions.

The journey is the prize.  If you don’t make one of the top three placings or win a special jersey for King of the Mountain or similar the financial rewards aren’t that great for three weeks spent pedaling around 3,500 kilometers, (or more than 2,000 miles).  I read that the prize for the fourth place winner is 70,000 Euros, (about $US100,000), and that tails down to the rider that finishes 19th earning just 1,000 Euros.  Even the winner, Alberto Contador, isn’t that well rewarded.  He gets 450,000 Euros, but that has to go toward paying for the team, (and there are nine riders in a team), the support vehicles, the team managers and cooks and buses and everything else.  I’m not saying the ones at the top don’t get enough in support and endorsements to make it worthwhile.  I do think it’s not the money that motivates the average participant.  You can bet they “get in the flow” when they get on their bike, and they get a reward from what they do that isn’t just financial.

Team results?  Team rewards.  Even if you only want to maximize the performance of the best rider, you had still better make sure you reward the whole team for their effort.  We know that there can only be one winner, and you would think the way to ensure that everyone puts in their best effort is to focus on rewarding individual achievement.  Instead, the teams and the organizers ensure there are prizes, jerseys and accolades enough to reward everyone.  Not every rider can be number one.  When you have to get the best out of more than a hundred cyclists you have to ensure that everyone has a stake in making it a great race.

Knocked over?   Get up again.  Every day someone “hits the wall” and falls behind, or literally hits a wall or something else and falls over.  Every day they get up and start over again.  When I was a kid I had tremendous resilience.  If I fell over I’d just dust myself off, get a band aid or two and carry on.  As we get older we lose that, and yet here are people riding with broken collar bones, bruises, cuts and all sorts of damage.  Most of what we think hurts us isn’t really that bad, and if we just get back on our bikes we are surprised by how far we can go.

The link to business?  I love the Tour De France.  There’s something wonderful about watching athletes of the highest caliber competing in any sport.  I think that if any of these cyclists have the inclination to participate in business they have the temperament to do pretty well.

A lesson in presence from The Next Food Network Star

Developing presence is one of the most common coaching requests from middle and senior executives. It’s rare that someone comes out and says “I need more presence”, but it’s common for people to review their 360 feedback or reflect on their career progression and decide they need a better ability to engage others and generate respect and support.

The Next Food Network Star is a reality program where a season’s worth of contestants come together to compete for the prize of their own show on the Food Network. Culinary challenges are thrown at the contestants each week with the aim of finding out two things: do they have cooking expertise, and do they have the presence to become a television star.

Something that makes the show different is that the judges’ panel includes two food network executives who provide real feedback and coaching. They want to select the finalist with the most presence who will generate ratings for them next season. Along the way they want to develop the finalists with the best potential to maximize their presence for the home audience.

This week, we got a lesson in developing presence from Melissa, (Season Five, Episode Seven if you want to Google it and see the show highlights). In this episode the network deliberately messes with the finalists, putting them on a live breakfast show with various technical faults they can’t anticipate and have to deal with on-air. The host gets Melissa’s name wrong repeatedly, and in various other ways gets her totally flustered on live television.

We see Melissa panic. Her delivery quickens, the tone of her voice goes up, and her facial expressions give away that hunted look that communicates “get me out of here”. After, the judges tell her what they saw, and give her advice on how to improve.

Here are the three things she does to improve her presence:

• Incorporate stakeholder feedback
• Communicate to connect
• Get in flow and enjoy the work

Incorporate stakeholder feedback. I have written before about what many people do when faced with negative feedback. Usually it’s one of four things. They claim it wasn’t really a problem, they provide reasons why they really aren't unhappy with the outcome, they blame something or someone else, or they act like what we know happened didn’t really happen. We can call these the Justify, Rationalize, Excuse and Deny strategies. The trouble is, trying to Justify, Rationalize, Excuse or Deny when we know something went wrong just makes things worse. It makes people want to argue with you so that you “get it”, or it makes them want to punish you so that you “get what’s coming to you”.

Melissa takes the opposite and better tactic. She acknowledges feedback and shows respect for her stakeholders by demonstrating to them how she has incorporated it into her behavior. Note: she doesn’t always have to agree, but she always at least acknowledges feedback and shows how it will affect what she does next time. In almost every case responding positively to audience feedback builds presence. It makes your audience invested in your success because they feel a part of what’s going on with you. In this case the judges panel are a proxy for the real at-home TV audience. Nevertheless, in a strange way watching Melissa take on the panel’s feedback engages our attention and commands our respect and support. (Or at least it did with me…your results may differ).

Communicate to connect. There are many aspects of communicating with presence. In this episode Melissa loses her audience when she is seen to mildly panic in front of them. The judges advise her to be more commanding with her communication. Melissa focuses on what she feels she can control, and we hear her tell herself that she is going to slow down her delivery to be more impactful. “When I slow down my speech my mind and body follow” she says. This is actually great advice for anyone. Call it gravitas, purpose or presence; we know that people with slower and more deliberate communication generally command more audience attention and respect. Speed of delivery is something concrete and actionable that most people can control.

Get in the flow and enjoy the work. You have to “read between the lines” to see this one in the episode. When people are given pep talks before going out to perform they are often told to “just go out there and enjoy yourself”. It’s easier said than done. However, I believe that’s because the advice often misses one vital aspect. You have to “get in the flow” and go enjoy yourself. Think of getting in the flow as being totally immersed and carried along by the work.

Flow is a concept popularized by one of my favorite psychologists, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. The big implication for presence is that audiences tend to mirror the emotions and behaviors of their presenters. Humans are wired for empathy and imitation. If we see someone enjoying themselves and fully engaged in their work we tend to be more interested and enjoy ourselves more as well. In her final challenge of the episode Melissa lets go of her anxieties, slows down her communication and visibly enjoys being fully engaged in her cooking. (And as an added bonus her better performance comes out in her meal!)

Presence is an elusive concept. Having an impressive appearance or bearing, commanding respect and attention, enlisting others sympathies and support….who wouldn’t want these things?

In this episode we see someone take on three highly actionable behaviors and improve their presence. Whenever I have clients who want to improve their presence here’s my three part program:

• Actively solicit stakeholder feedback and visibly incorporate it into your behavior
• Communicate to connect, (we often need to look at just what is being done to lose the audience)
• Get in the flow and enjoy your work

What's in a word, (or a title)?

There's a lot in a word, or the titles you chose for your programs! I’ve written before on the importance of paying close attention to the words used in an organization to get a feeling for what the organization holds important. A recent article in Newsweek shows it’s not only the actual words that are used; it’s also how the words are used.

The article quotes Lera Boroditsky, a psychologist at Stanford. She has done a series of experiments showing that people who use words from different cultures and languages actually see the world differently according to the words they use and how they use them.

We have known for a long time that having a word for something enables you think about the thing in a more sophisticated way. The best example is the way Eskimos are supposed to have many words for snow, so they are able to recognize many types of snow. Closer to home, my father was an interior designer. He had many words for “red”. Consequently, he could accurately remember different colors, match different patterns, and tell you if someone’s dress was really “red” or perhaps scarlet, carmine, crimson, pink, burgundy, cherry, or even madder lake.

Boroditsky also shows how the language used to describe an event can affect not only what you see and remember, but how you think about what you saw.

To quote the article,

“English says "she broke the bowl" even if it smashed accidentally (she dropped something on it, say), Spanish and Japanese describe the same event more like "the bowl broke itself." "When we show people video of the same event," says Boroditsky, "English speakers remember who was to blame even in an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers remember it less well than they do intentional actions. It raises questions about whether language affects even something as basic as how we construct our ideas of causality."

So when you chose the language that is acceptable in your organization one thing you are doing is enabling everyone to share a common meaning more accurately. For example, calling something “red” could be open to many interpretations, but calling it “scarlet” is likely to lead to more accurate color matching.

You could go further and say that if you chose the right words not only can you ensure more accuracy, you can positively influence how people think about the thing you are describing.

I’m about to head off to plan a workshop on performance for a high performing group of professionals in the legal industry. Do you think it matters if we call it “Performance Calibration and Consensus Planning” or “Raising the Bar on Results”?