How to create a high performance culture | Andrew Sillitoe | TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells

[Music] when I first heard I was going to be speaking at Ted this about 6 weeks ago I immediately started typing my script and it's been an obsession ever since I don't know about the other speakers but and I was saying to my wife yesterday that um it's not ready it just doesn't feel right you know something doesn't feel right she said oh don't worry it'll be fine you know this was yesterday right there's people in this room thinking that's not what we rehearsed on Wednesday and I said you don't get it this is Ted

if this goes viral it's career defining I'll be the next Simon cynic you know and then I realized that I'd completely missed the point that um I i' forgot my purpose in this and so I'm going to flip the script I woke up this I was on my bike this morning I'm going to talk about something different and I think we are losing our purpose in society you know purpose is about meaning in our life it's about staying engaged and you know when things are tough and it's about connection and i' i' I'd lost that

connection with you it become about me and not you yeah so um I'm going to talk about that for a bit I think whether you are an athlete or a teacher or a parent or running a business we cannot operate at our full potential without purpose now I was I was sharing this about six years ago uh in Canary war with a group of Traders now I just want you to picture the the room it's 2009 and they're just starting their career in trading in the city okay so the crisis just hit and I'm in

there and I'm talking about purpose right and to be fair to they were getting into it they started to get the idea but there was this chat in the corner of my eye throughout the whole session and he was just heckling me throughout the day just wasn't getting it um in his words this is bollocks and uh this anyway in the afternoon he said to me um he said Andrew you've been talking about purpose all day you've been talking about asking us why we do what we do what gets us out of bed every day

he said what do you do what what gets you out of bed you know why do you do what you do what's your purpose which is a fair question to ask the person who's talking about purpose right and I knew the answer cuz I I'd ref reflected on it in the past and I said to him do you remember the rocky films do you remember the rocky films yeah Rocky five Tommy Gun I said that's the worst I said I remember that film um I remember watching it it was a Sunday night it was a

it was 1993 March 21st I remember watching that film and Sundays in my house uh pretty stand I would have been out all day playing street hockey I'd have been at Safeways car park in t Welles I still it safe ways um I'd been playing all day I'd come home had a roast dinner with my family um and we' have watch sport it would have been Cricket football golf or snooker one of those four depending on the time of year and this night I was watching my dad um loves sport he was a baker my

granddad was a baker and I always expected the business to be mine but when I was 11 my dad sold the business he sold it so that was kind of the end of that I still feel like a baker but but he um he s to be fair to me made a lot of money he moved into into construction and um we had this wonderful we made big houses in t Welles we had this wonderful big house and we had a you know the fancy holidays to PTO you know all that kind of Mara you

know all that nice stuff we had this wonderful e type Jag blue e type Jag used to sit on the drive but as quickly as he made all his money lost a lot it was the mid 80s and that's what happened in construction lost it and our lives changed like that and on his Sunday night he um he came to the door and I was watching this film and he said to me I'm going to bed come and give your dad a hug and I said no no you've had a drink he said come and

give me a hug I said no no and he went to bed I didn't and he went to bed that was the last time I saw him he died a heart attack age 48 and I looked at this guy and I said do you know that 20% of people die in the early hours of a Monday Morning broughten by the stress and anxiety and fear of facing work the next day I said I don't want that to happen to you or anybody that's why I do what I do let's shut him up um I feel

blessed to live in t Welles actually because I I grew up playing street hockey in TS and I um I got my first stick when I was nine um and it changed my life forever I was 9 years old I played other sports but I think you know Paul was talking about giving children opportunity you know 80% of young people young 14year olds will become disengaged with sport 80% because they're looking for Alternatives they and we don't we're not offering it but I was lucky because I found street hockey and I went on this extraordinary

Journey with the tel Street Cruisers and we would play all over Europe we would drive out to Amsterdam Rotterdam uh we'd go out to dorf and play in these Ro hockey tournaments out there out into the mountains in Switzerland we even went off to Chicago to play in Chicago we had an amazing we didn't have very much money we had to save our pennies in fact when we used to go to Europe we used to rent a Transit van we used to put our hockey bags in the back and put mattresses on top so we'd

go out and that would be our accommodation for the weekend um and uh we were the first team believe it or not the first T well Street Cruisers was the first team in 95 to switch from traditional roller skates roller blade you know the quads to rollerblades because we thought it would give us a competitive Advantage it was a disaster but what happened is that we uh you know people thought it was hilarious because the first tournament we played and we came last and this was in Switzerland and everyone thought we were crazy for doing

it they couldn't understand why we'd made this this transition until of course we started winning and in 98 the T Street Cruisers beat the dorf Rams in the final of the championship now if you speak to the team and say you know tell me about your experience it's very rare that they'll talk about the winning you know winning is great it's it's a wonderful feeling winning but if you ask them they'll talk about the sacrifice they'll talk about the RO road trips obviously I can't tell you the stories because you know the rules um they'll

talk about the fact that we owned it that we shaped it it was ours we didn't have a coach or a manager telling us where to be what to do it was all self-directed by us and the following uh 10 15 years I played in 12 world championships for team Great Britain at inline hockey I played I was turned from America playing and an 2010 I took on the head coaching job for team Great Britain and I'd acquired a team that had lost in the quarterfinals of Paul B in the world championships Paul B is

is essentially like divisions two and Paul a is the top eight countries in the world so Sweden Czech Republic Canada USA Etc the top I icky countries that come across and um so I I'd noticed that they'd become a bit disengaged with playing for their country having lost to Australia in the quarterfinals the year before in pool B so I was going to go in there you know all guns blazing as head coach and I was going to create the exact same culture as I had experienced with the T Street cruises the problem is you

cannot take one culture and put it on another it just doesn't work right and that was my experience so I had to rethink what I was doing with the team and and think about um putting a different set of rules in and these are the the five rules I'm going to share with you that I put in place that for me have helped create an environment where everybody can absolutely Thrive and I think we all have a responsibility to create that type of type of environment so the first thing first thing we did with the

with the team GB is that they needed their own story they needed their own story not one that I was trying to force on our story happened over 10 years it was organic you can't just recreate that but I had nine months before the world championships and their story what they came up with was that they wanted to look act and feel like a PO a team to look act and feel not to win the gold medal in pool B but to look act and feel that was their vision for the team now I couldn't

go in and say well if you want that you need to eat better you need to train harder because you you still get resistance so I promised myself that I would not tell them to do anything and I would just ask them if that if that's what you want to achieve I would just ask them the questions there were some things I had to to put in place around strategy and how we play the game but I wanted them to come forward with everything for them to thrive and really own it like I we had

the other thing is I wanted to create leaders in in the team in team Great Britain I didn't want to I didn't want follow followers are good for the ego they're not good for business right they're not good for sustaining change they're not good for creating a high high performance culture so I wanted to create leaders and that's my captain I always said you needed Captain you you need assistant captains out there you need people who can influence change and we need a change the other thing is I promise that we would Embrace failure absolutely

embrace it because what I could see was a group of players who were Paralyzed by the fear of failure and it was prevents them from playing at their full potential so we we said we'll embrace it embrace the unknown and when the street Cruiser switched to to rollerblades it was a failure but we came back stronger and we ended up winning and you know when you take a risk it's going to go one of two ways isn't it you're going to have it's going to be a really good experience and you learn from it or

it might be not a great experience and you learn from it right so either way it's a bonus the other thing is if you can do all of that then we could hold each other accountable we could look each other in the eye and feel absolutely trusted that we would do what we said we would do now the problems that I'm seeing which is driving disengagement is that I see in education I see it in uh businesses is that we are focused on that holding people accountable businesses are getting better and the reason why they're

getting better because they realize if you engage people if you help them find their purpose it means they're more productive they will be more engaged and that means more profit organizations like that in sports we're seeing athletes as a commodity which is drawn driving personal greed and corporate greed and Corruption as we've seen recently with FIFA because we're just focused on performance in schools we're seeing academic robots on a conveyor belt to something they don't know where they're going because that's what they're being told what to do because they're being held accountable what's this one

that's a degrade send it back yeah it's not the system is not working we need to rethink how we can create an environment where everybody can Thrive feel inspired and operate their full potential so I've shared my story with you I'd like you to think about what your story is and what you can do to help others thrive in this world thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music]