🐿️ Racewalking - The IPT Newsletter
Originally published 12th August 2024
In the past few weeks, the news from France has been full of steely-eyed gunslingers and levitating surfers–but the big eye-opener of the Olympics for me was racewalking. I started off being amused by the spectacle of very fit athletes taking up an ungainly waddle to make their way through Parisian streets, but it soon became apparent that these folks move incredibly quickly given the severe restrictions of the sport. Most athletic events let participants use any safe method to get over the finish line, whether they employ the Australian crawl or the Fosbury Flop, but walkers, like non-freestyle swimmers, have to operate within tight constraints: a straight supporting leg and constant ground contact. A gaggle of judges peer over every inch of the course looking for violations and red cards are common–no wonder it can take years of training just to get the stride right before you’re ready to go fast.
The executives I coach often give me puzzled looks when I tell them they need to improve their conversations to get better results–after all, they talk to people all day, so what’s to learn? They would do well to look at Olympic walkers, who have honed and polished a behaviour acquired as toddlers until it’s become a powerful means of propulsion. Similarly, when leaders start actively practising conversational skills like asking genuine questions and aligning stories, they make incredible progress in building trust and transforming culture. One client of mine recently decided to “say what he saw”, as I’ve been hounding him to do, and told a colleague that he could no longer believe what he was hearing in her briefings. The resulting conflict was painful, but productive, and far better than silently ignoring the suspect data.
It would be easy to just keep walking and talking as we’ve always done, but conscious practise and constant improvement can produce incredible results, both on the racetrack and in the boardroom. What are you doing to develop your discourse and refine your rapport?
This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 12th August 2024. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/
