S&PAProfessional / Summer 2024
WORKPLACE FOCUS
s professionals working in health and fitness you’ll know that the inspirational talks given by successful sports personalities are grounded in experience and hard work. But how can the lessons from sports performance be transferred to business organisations? We’ve done our own hard work, spending time researching for our new book, Rest. Practise. Perform. From this we’ve found three essential lessons that all organisations can learn about performance from elite sport.
A
SUSTAINABLE PERFORMANCE
What can F1, tennis and football teach the world of business?
WHY FOCUS ON ELITE SPORTS? Our research explored three very different elite sports: F1, tennis and football. In each, people are able to define what sustainable performance means for them; something that is often not clearly defined in business organisations. In our research we did find some performance parallels with organisations. For example, sometimes people perform all together, as in football. This could be a key event or sales pitch. Sometimes the work requires making sure that a key person has everything they need to perform. And at other times, everyone is performing at different times, building up to some kind of finale. This is common in a product development process, for example.
By John lan McLach
THE REST, PRACTISE, PERFORM. APPROACH The techniques behind Rest. Practise. Perform. can teach valuable tips on sustainable performance and wellbeing too. That’s because we found that strategies within elite sports use a combination of well-designed rest and a lot of the right kind of practise, all of which lead up to an intense performance window to produce sustainable and successful results. We discuss them in more depth here,
38 www.cimspa.co.uk
Workplace_Summer 2024_S&PA Professional.indd 38
12/06/2024 15:07