On Wednesday 29th November 2017 Elite Performance Partners, in partnership with Miramar Global Executive search, hosted a Leadership Forum in Soho, London to discuss one important subject, ‘How Do Leaders Create A High-Performance Organisation’.

The event was a great success with over 100 senior leaders from the world of sport and business in attendance.

The evening commenced with an introduction from Andrew Stoneham-Knott, CEO at Miramar Globaland David Slemen, Managing Director of Elite Performance Partners where they explained why they had chosen to host this event with the recognition that their clients across both sport and business were facing similar leadership challenges.

There was then a panel discussion on leadership, high performance and the importance of culture and group values. The panellists were:

  • Dave Reddin – Head of Team Strategy and Performance at The Football Association
  • Gordon Wilson – Chief Executive Officer at Advanced
  • Jacqui Ferguson – former Chief Executive Officer at HPE UKI/MEMA

Reddin, Wilson and Ferguson were all able to utilise their unique blend of experience and expertise to encourage the audience to discuss and improve upon their approach to performance, growth, culture and diversity.

We have summarised below the key messages and points that came out of the panel discussion.

Everyone takes different learnings from these events but there were 3 things that jumped out for us:

  1. The importance of having a clear, compelling vision of success which gets everyone excited every day and the need for organisational alignment to be driven by that vision. It is also surprising how often you have to keep reminding people of this vision.
  2. Identifying the performance gap – where we are and where we need to be – both Dave and Jacqui used exactly the same language when talking about this which we found fascinating. They discussed the importance of understanding and confronting reality and the further challenge of what you need to do to make that change. The second point here is much more difficult to address due to often a general reluctance to change whether it be in business or sport.
  3. In business there is a much more dispassionate approach to people compared to sport, particularly when there are issues of under-performance or difficult choices need to be made. This isn’t necessarily a good thing but perhaps something we need to be aware of.

If you would like to learn more about developing effective strategies to create a high-performance organisation, or want to be notified about our future events, please get in touch.