How to create a high-performance culture in your organisation?

Culture can be defined as how we do things and how things get done. The decisions we make about how we do things are dependent upon our ethics, philosophies, habits, traditions, attitudes, prejudices, rituals, emotions, feelings, beliefs, and values. Although these influences are often intangible and difficult to see, they have a huge impact on our relationships, performance, and productivity.

"Our values are a source of personal excellence and high performance. They exist inside of us all the time. All we need to do is awaken them"

Value-driven culture

Our shared values influence our attitudes, emotions, habits, and behaviours. Values are the glue that holds us together. We know from the peak performance literature people in values-driven cultures excel. Athletes In the Zone aims to develop a values-driven culture that shows how values, when consciously lived in the work environment, reduce entropy, improve relationships, increase performance, and enhance growth, ambition, and productivity.

Performance ethic culture

Successful organisations have a performance ethic that combines the ambition to do the unthinkable and the discipline to deliver the nearly impossible. They create a vision (an impossible/inspirational goal) that is often considered unachievable. Impossible/inspirational goals are the goals of high achievers. When people commit to achieving these goals, they improve their performance, increase their productivity and achieve great things. American president JFK, for example, set the inspiring goal to put a man on the moon, this ignited a new wave of technology and innovation and is a landmark in man's history. Michael Jordan set a goal to make the Chicago Bulls, who were the worst team in NBA, become world champions. His inspiring vision elevated him and his team to greatness. The performance ethic is grounded in a widely shared set of values and beliefs that drive a passion and a desire to renew the methods, processes, systems, and skills required to develop human potential.

Committing to transformational targets

Organisations with people who commit to transformational targets are open to learning and renewal, have a growth mindset, are more successful and flourish. With this knowledge, we aim to set several transformational targets/goals to encourage, inspire and motivate our teams to renew, innovate and create change.

Achieving organisational excellence

Our current approach to achieving organisational excellence is through the practice of a client/coach-centered approach. Experienced practitioners know this approach is what really works in high-performing organisations. This approach means we focus on serving both the athlete and their coaches' needs. It also means the sports science support team views the coach as a specialist in the consultant-client relationship. This requires a paradigm shift from "I know best", due to my expertise and experience in my field, to an ideology where the coach is also an expert in my field because of his vast experiential knowledge. This paradigm shift has led to the development of new ways of working, stronger teams, high levels of collaboration, and the development of new performance-enhancing intervention strategies.

Autonomy-supportive environment

Autonomy is a basic psychological need and key to the development of people who are highly motivated and want to achieve success. Considerable research evidence has demonstrated the effectiveness of autonomy-supportive climates in business and sport, and we aim to support this highly effective performance-enhancing strategy.