Podcast: What can leaders learn from the Olympics?

Published: July 31, 2024

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An In Good Company podcast with Sue Hunt, Director of Strategic Programmes from London 2012 Olympics

Behind the scenes of the Olympics

Three reasons why you might like this podcast:

You love the Olympics – get ready to enjoy a fascinating behind the scenes.
You’re responsible for managing projects – tune in for an inspirational story of managing one of the biggest global events, with real life takeaways.
You are in a team – hear top tips from someone who grew a team and then disbanded it as quickly as it had grown.

Latest listen

Sue Hunt was Director of Strategic Programmes at the London 2012 Olympic Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. She stepped into this role in 2007 with a remit to oversee all the programmes to deliver the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012. Within three months of joining the Organising Committee she had also taken on the role of chief operating officer, running everything from cleaning, waste, transport, security, logistics right the way through to international relations.

Here’s a snippet of what you can expect.

How did you engage people on a large scale?

The Olympic Organising Committee is a unique organisation. When I joined, we were about 60 people and at the Games we had 200,000 people in the workforce. But one thing that's common throughout, is communication. Communication, communication, communication. Make sure that everybody knows where they fit into the organisation, what their purpose is, what their individual contribution would be to the overall success of the games.

Our mantra (which we stole from GB Rowing) was 'will it make the boat go faster?' Whenever people were stuck or didn't know what decision to make or what they were trying to prioritise, then we always used to throw that question back. Will it make the boat go faster? Having something as simple as that, clear values that people can relate to, penetrates through the organisation and is very powerful. But we also had the benefit as an organisation that people really wanted to be there. It was a rare experience, but one that was really exciting to be part of.

How did you deal with overwhelm?

I can remember getting the job and thinking, ‘wow, this is great’. And then the next day thinking, ‘oh my goodness, how am I going to deliver this?’ But it's like anything, you break it down into parts and then suddenly it becomes more manageable. Very early on we sat down, and we developed an overall scope for delivering the Games… all the sports we had to deliver, all of the services we needed, all the venues and all the stakeholders that need to be involved and all the infrastructure need to put in place to deliver it. That really helped to develop the overall roadmap and the key milestones. This made it much easier to manage and ensure we didn't have scope creep.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify

Watch our interview here: