Breaking point: Creating high performance culture without cracking

Everyone has a psychological breaking point. I met mine as an England Cricketer in front of 120,000 screaming fans at Eden Gardens, Calcutta. England were calling out for a hero as the high pressure run chase reached its climax. Amid the noise, I ran out Freddie Flintoff and my brain suddenly switched to panic mode which ended with me playing a high risk shot and us losing the game.

This moment changed my life in a number of ways. Thankfully, I did play for England again and it fueled my motivation to study an MSc in sport psychology to help leaders and teams in business and sport to perform at their best under pressure.

Whether you are an athlete or a lawyer, every single one of us is subject to pressures, and understanding how we and our teams respond to those pressures can often make the difference between success and failure.

The impact of stress on lawyers and legal teams

Research from Slater & Gordon last year highlighted the intense pressures that lawyers work under. Their research found that although 37 per cent of all workers in the UK claim that stress has made them under-perform at work, when looking solely at lawyers the figure rises to 52 per cent, making them the most stressed profession in the country. They also found that more than half of lawyers have taken sick leave due to too much pressure at work and a third said they have been so stressed they have cried at work.

 

These levels of stress can cause not just team issues and mental health problems for individual staff, but also physical health problems. Our brains were initially built 50,000 years ago and have not had an upgrade to keep pace with the modern world. As a result, the exact same fight and flight response which activated to keep us safe now gets activated to protect our self-esteem.

When our perception of a psychological threat builds, our adrenal glands release cortisol to help our brains and bodies cope with the stress. We usually have low levels which are increased by cortisol bursts when we need to deal with a crisis. In a chronic stress situation the negative feedback loop stops getting the message and our bodies pump out more and more cortisol. The neuroscientist Tara Swart explains: 'The levels of cortisol going around your body in your blood system start to erode your immunity and that starts off with headache, backache and starts to increase into more colds and flus every winter and at the other end of the spectrum that is the mechanism for stress-induced heart attacks and cancers.'

In the Savannah, our bodies and brains were primed for long periods of calm followed by occasional periods of stress. The problem for modern high performers is that this threat never goes away. The six times world champion canoeist Anna Hemming experienced this when she spent two years suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. 'The big thing for me was not listening to my body's warning signs, I thought I was being resilient but really I was just being stubborn. I needed to learn to say no more often.'

Pressure points for lawyers

Saying no is not easy when clients are squeezing tight on consultancy and advisory fees, and competition is more intense than ever before from overseas lawyers and the big accountancy firms. The 'UK Legal Services Market Report 2015' highlights the impact of this competition with the number of private practice law firms in England and Wales falling by 500 in the last two years.

At the same time as these competitive pressures, the banking crisis fallout and country specific trading sanctions mean that many in the legal world need to wade through more regulation than ever before, having to stay on top of changes and quickly help their clients amend procedures to protect them from hefty fines and sometimes criminal proceedings.

Adding to these stresses is the 'always on' culture, being expected to be within reach of a mobile phone 24 hours a day where you are bombarded with push messages. This, in effect, is other people setting your to do list and it's challenging your most prized psychological asset - your focus.

And it is no good to simply be a great lawyer. Today's managing partners need to be voracious sales people too. Being commercially aware and selling services is now an integral part of the job description, which is not the reason most lawyers trained in the first place.

Having to adapt and develop new skills in this unprecedented era of change is now the new normal, so what can law firms and business units do to develop resilience and agility?

Pressure testing

When it comes to pressure, prevention is better than cure! So work hard to understand the challenges in the road ahead both for your team and its individuals. By preparing for high pressure client pitches or difficult conversations, we are more likely to make a considered response rather than an emotional reaction. Get your team to test 'what if' scenarios and create crisis plans in the calm of the office. The England cricketers were too proud to say that the crowd would affect them so I presumed I was the only one worried about it. Talk about your pressures and embrace them as part of the challenge, otherwise they will build up like a volcano and surface when you need it least.

Help individuals first

Neuroscientist John Coates says that the three factors that activate the stress response are novelty, uncertainty, and uncontrollability, so make sure that you are able to simplify your plans and tighten your time frames during periods of volatility. Many law firms will struggle to develop a ten year strategy, but providing the direction and goals for your next six months will allow people to develop their plans and focus on their execution.

In the modern world, the best leaders measure their success by the quality of their decisions not just their volume. When we are under pressure we look to make snap decisions where we rely too heavily on stereotypes and bias. Psychologist and expert on biases, Professor Binna Kandola says that 'under situations like stress and tiredness, we are more likely to revert to type when we want to make a decision very quickly, actually we are no longer looking at the evidence, we are going back to using our stereotypes or our images or our first impressions of people, instant prejudgements that we've made of people. They come to the fore, because it's quicker.'

Not only do our decisions need to take in a range of objective views, but we need to be considered in the way we communicate the outputs. RADA communication expert Lisa Akesson has two key points for us: 'You need to move beyond the data to engage people, develop an emotionally engaging story which gets people passionate about what you are doing and slow down your breathing and delivery so that your confidence shines through. People will trust you when you are communicating in an authentic controlled way'.

One of the biggest growth areas in elite sport is not the performance phase but the recovery. With corporate athletes looking to cram more and more work in, stressed staff need to really take care of themselves physically if they are going to sustain their success. There is so much wellbeing information available that it can almost feel like an unrealistic option, but the truth is that we are human performers and without the correct balance of sleep, hydration, nutrition, and exercise we will never have the energy we need to deliver our best. Physical resilience promotes psychological resilience so prioritising exercise in your day or into your commute will give you the edge you need to stay ahead.

When considering your personal energy at work, the people you surround yourself with will be key players too. Who inspires and energises you in the office? Who drains you with their negativity and problems? Finding a way to stop negative people contaminating your mindset is a key skill of elite performers, so find ways to limit your time with them or allow them less options to affect your mood.

Sometimes the best performers are the most problematic. Shane Warne, one of the most famous sporting mavericks, says 'people often see mavericks as difficult to manage in the team. Well, it's quite easy to handle them in my opinion, you need to make them feel part of it. So even if they aren't the leader of the team, they might not have an official title but they are the sort of go to person that everyone looks up to. You've got to make them feel involved and make them feel like part of the decision-making process. And even more important than that is to make them feel important. If you try and make them do what everyone else does then they may rebel'. Having some flexibility in your team culture can work well in teams as long as the mavericks give more to the team than they take - so keep a close eye on their results because their impact on the team can be huge.

Under pressure, everyone becomes self-focused so consider the development plans for each individual and the balance of support and challenge they need to get the best out of their performance. In a fast moving business it's easy to become isolated and disengaged, but everyone wants to improve, so before we bring everyone together, make sure that everyone is on the path to their personal best.

Build team culture

With clear personal development plans in place for each individual and the mavericks under control, the stage is set for developing a strong team culture.

Don't expect high performance to be easy though, often it's the shared suffering and overcoming setbacks which galvanizes teams together fastest. As Ade Adepitan former captain of the Team GB Wheelchair Basketball team, says: 'I look back at some of our most challenging times, whether physical or emotional, and they brought us closer as a team, we could look across the room at our team mates and know we shared that time together'.

Your challenge as the leader is to bring this team together to respond to the pace and challenge of the current market. This will take a certain mindset and we need to move away from the fear of failure and scarcity and look for opportunities to pick up speed and market share.

Most teams have untapped potential, so taking a step back to consider the bigger picture is a key skill for leaders. Baroness Sue Campbell, former chair of UK Sport, asked three questions of each staff member when she took her role: 'What do you do, what could you do, and what stops you doing it? When I asked these three things it told me all I needed to know about what that person thought that they and the team were capable of in the future.'

Being the social detective for these changes in interpersonal chemistry is as important as understanding your business P&L. Just like a company's share price, the mood in the camp is affected on a daily basis by every success and failing within the team and as a leader you need to be reading the signals. Make sure you are aware of who is being quieter or noisier than normal as these can be signs of pressure building.

Role clarity is another area for performance gain - not only should everyone know their own roles but they should also know the roles of their peers. When this clarity is present in a group it allows collaboration and ideas sharing, but also reduces duplication and wasted resources. Once these honest performance conversations take place in the group setting we can focus on performance and not false friendships. Sport teaches us that we don't need to see ourselves as mates but we do need to be team mates.

Sir Matthew Pinsent told Sporting Edge that the culture in his Olympic gold medal winning boats was much more task focused than a friendly social feel: 'We knew we were there to do a job, we asked each other three times a day, if this isn't making the boat go faster then why are we doing it?' Imagine having the courage to challenge processes within your business like this. As long as the challenge is respectful and not personal then its fine, but it's unrealistic to think that we will all be friends outside of work when we are recruited for our different skillsets and multidisciplinary backgrounds.

This ruthless performance focus is critical to staying ahead of our competition, but to be fuelled by purely extrinsic motivators of profits and personal targets is a key mistake for law firms. When coaching the South African cricket team I saw that reaching number one ranking in Test cricket was a hugely inspiring goal for the team and one which they achieved. But after reaching it, their motivation waned as they had satisfied everyone's expectations.

The team then realised that they had a much bigger goal which went beyond winning in the short term. When their team of seven different cultures worked together, it inspired everyone watching them that collaboration was possible across the schools, clubs, and businesses of the rainbow nation. This shared purpose of making an impact on people's lives then shaped the way the team managed its culture. South Africa have sustained their success in Test cricket by balancing short term wins with their long term legacy.

So what impact is your business having on the lives of its staff, stakeholders, and customers? Because when we balance profit and purpose we unlock the potential of our people and work together across the silos of the business to enjoy what they do and deliver outstanding results. By understanding the psychology of the Winning Mindset, my moment of madness in India could have been avoided, and I hope these insights help your staff and teams to raise their game too.

Jeremy Snape is a former England cricketer and the founder of Sporting Edge, a high performance consultancy
(https://www.sportingedge.com)