An In Good Company podcast with Roy White
How can organisations improve performance and wellbeing?
Can you truly excel at work without sacrificing your wellbeing? How do you manage your individual performance? Do you feel like your organisation prioritises results at all costs? It can be all too easy to feel that high performance is the goal and talk of wellbeing a nice to have rather than a reality.
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Roy White has over 30 years’ experience in HR and L&D and a Masters in Sports Psychology. Who better to start the conversation on creating the critical balance between performance, wellbeing and leadership in the workplace? Roy shares valuable insights on how individuals can manage their performance, discusses the importance of recovery, the role of leadership in creating supportive environments, and practical strategies to prevent burnout. This episode is a brilliant listen for individuals and leaders aiming to optimise their daily activities and overall output.
"We need to focus more on recovery and doing things away from work. For us to perform, we can't perform in a straight line."
What do we mean when we talk about individual performance?
"Often when I'm working with organisations or groups of leaders, I'll ask them what was their performance last year? And they'll give me numbers, sales growth or profit etc, and they don't talk about what leads up to that, what they did day to day. Performance for me is your day-to-day activity, what that leads to in terms of output, and how you can influence that. It’s the average of your consistent output or performance."
What key factors influence individual performance?
"There are lots of formulas, but I like Tim Gallwey’s from his book the “The Inner Game”. Performance is your potential. Think about a great workday, when you feel you're really on your game, you know you can deal with anything. That's your potential. And what gets in the way of you achieving that every day is what he calls interference. From a personal level, he puts interference into three categories. Physical interference – how well you sleep, eat, move. Mental interference – self-doubt, the questioning, how you react to certain situations. And finally spiritual interference – which he describes as how much you are aligned to the work that you're doing. I like this as we can all relate to these areas and can see where they get in the way."
How can leaders help create a culture that promotes both high performance and wellbeing?
"Talk to your team, ask them what gets in the way of them performing. And then help create an environment where they can perform. Your job is to protect them from the things, the interference that gets in their way. And it might mean doing things that feel counterintuitive. Sometimes it might mean letting people have more breaks or holiday. But it will be about letting them tell you what they need to perform. And then you put those things in place."
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