by Peter A. Arthur-Smith
“In sports, business and other fields, single-minded focus is often the path to burnout and disappointment. To achieve ambitious goals, well-roundedness is a better bet.” From article by Steve Magness, athletic coach and performance consultant, in Wall street Journal review, February, 2025, entitled ‘Why All-In Is No Recipe for Success.’
Magness discovered, as I did many years ago, that an “all in” approach isn’t a recipe for optimum success. So many leaders-managers haven’t appreciated or don’t appreciate this real-life contradiction. Certainly Wall Street and its numbers-obsessed adherents don’t, since they’re constantly pressuring us to go flat-out every day, every week, every month. It’s time we started to push back by pursuing a different reality. Do we wish to be a “flash in the pan” or a longer term success?
I didn’t fully appreciate this reality until a number of years ago, when I was determined to give myself and family a break
after some months of success. We took a two-week plus trip to Australia and New Zealand. With far fewer instant communication tools than we have today, I agreed with my colleagues that they would take the reins and only contact me in an emergency. In fact, I didn’t hear from them at all and so returned to beaming faces that shared their interim successes. Many things became a whole lot clearer from that break, which allowed us to move forward from strength to strength.
We did the same much more often after that. Is it surprising that we’ve subsequently visited all seven continents and well over 80 countries – and counting – to handle the rigors of life and work and gain a better perspective of the future?
From that experience, I discovered Periscope Time with the advantage of taking regular monthly/six-weekly time-outs, usually after a long-weekend to decompress, to figure out where we’re at and where we’re going. It’s something I recommend to every venture leader – and for their team members, too. In fact, Magness’s article alludes to several other examples and advisories on how to offset that single-minded focus. It includes an example of an upcoming Olympic athlete who needed to make a performance breakthrough. Her breakthrough happened by taking up “knitting” as a way to prepare for the Olympics. It reinforces the merits of pursuing other interests, hobbies or valuable distractions to help supercharge your next key breakthrough.
Effective or enlightened leaders take a similar approach with their teams. They know when to give their teams a break, either literally or allow them to “coast” for a period of time before making a concerted push for their finish line or a particular objective. And, more important, celebrate success in an enjoyable and prudent way to aid momentum. Lavish celebrations are often unnecessary distractions within any overall serious group.
The reality is that if you’re aiming for long term performance, it’s advisable both for yourself and your team to pace yourselves properly and know how to unwind. Encouraging your team members to pursue other outside interests beyond their work or competitive sport is pretty well a must as far as Magness is concerned…even if it’s just “knitting”! Besides, having other interests makes them more interesting team members and even allows for them to occasionally talk about those interests at team meetings. Team meetings which are totally agenda driven about domain matters can become boring and suffocating over time.
When it comes to teams, be that with sports or commercial ventures, we so often hear about the “flash in the pan” success stories that make a splash and then fade away. That’s why regular time-outs for a day or half-day at a sensibly-fun location can make a big difference to celebrate ongoing progress. This is the fundamental difference between high-performing teams led by people-leaders and a bunch of individual players supervised by overly serious numbers-managers…the latter persist in pursuing continuous outsize performance! The former will come up trumps so many times over, while the latter so often invites burnout and despondency. Will someone inform Wall Street!