Maximising our performance
In business and in sport, every team wants to reach its full potential and perform at its peak level. That’s extremely hard to achieve and sustain unless the results really matter. Effort and interest levels tend to drop when success is far too easy, or when it’s pretty much impossible to achieve.
It’s difficult to muster any interest or effort when winning doesn’t bring any real benefits. We need the passion of a pumping red heart to push us. To perform at our best, we need some skin in the game, a powerful reason to succeed. We need a rivalry.
Teams tend to exert their maximum effort and intensity when winning desperately matters to them. That’s because we perform better when we’re driven and pushed to succeed. We raise our game whenever there’s a concerted pressure on us to perform.
We reach higher performance levels when we’re highly motivated. We reach our peak performance when we’re driven by a powerful desperation to win, or a desperation not to lose.
Pressure and Rivalry
Whilst too much stress is not good for us, some pressure can help us to perform better. Feeling the pressure of a big event can help us to be at our best. Feeling the pressure of a big game, a big sales pitch, or a regulatory lesson observation can be good for us. We can’t raise our game to that level all day, every day, but we can learn to build up to big events. And none come bigger than pitching or playing against your biggest rivals.
We need to learn how to use the power of a rivalry to help us peak positively. Then we need to learn how to come straight back down again afterwards. We can’t keep raising our game to its maximum peak, week after week. That’s too much to ask.
Luckily many organisations don’t have to face their biggest rival every week. For those that do, keeping a lid on the feelings of rivalry is very important.
What kinds of rivalry are there?
Rivalries arise for different reasons. They might be another club or organisation that’s based close by, or a competitor in the same marketplace, or an opponent who always gives you a tough time.
Rivalries can occur almost everywhere. They can be a fierce sporting rivalry, such as the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox in baseball, Real Madrid and Barcelona in football, India v Pakistan in cricket or Queensland v New South Wales in rugby league. They can be in business, think Coca-Cola v Pepsi, or McDonalds v Burger King. In politics, just think Republicans v Democrats or Labour v Conservatives. When one of the rivals take a stride forward, the other is desperate to catch up.
On an extreme level, there rivalries of war create an intensity of performance. Many of the World’s technological breakthroughs have come from war. The epic seriousness and fear of military action seriously focuses the mind. In Ancient Rome, rivalries were matters of life and death in the Colosseum.
Who are your rivals?
Does your team have a rival? Maybe you have more than one. Can you use your rivalries to motivate your team and drive up its intensity? Can you use it to produce performance improvements? Can you use it to produce performance peaks?
Used well, a rivalry should give you the extra incentive you need to drive up your performance.