The Edge: The balancing act of pushing boundaries for high performance and achieving sustainable success

“The flame that burns twice as bright, burns half as long”

Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching (or from the film Bladerunner if you’re a heathen like me!)

This quote struck me as very apt after recently watching the BBC documentary ‘The Edge’, in which I listened to Andy Flower reflect about the time he’d presided over the England cricket team’s meteoric rise to world No.1, and ask the big question – was it worth it?

I’ll ask non-cricketing fans to bear with me a little longer, and reassure you this is an article focused on leadership and driving performance for sustainable results, with today’s business world in mind! To cricketing fans I’ll simply recommend it as a really good watch!

For those not familiar with events, in 2009 the England cricket team was not in good shape. Enter a new leadership team, and appointed to the helm was the accomplished coach Andy Flower. Flower quickly set a vision to turn around the teams’ fortunes, with the ambitious target to rise from near the bottom of the world rankings to No.1 in just 2 years. It was achieved after 18 months! But then it quickly imploded, and whilst charting the phenomenal progress of the team during this 2-year period, the documentary also depicts the collateral damage that surfaced as the trade-off for reaching this challenging goal. Some of the team suffered physically, some mentally. Some careers were subsequently dislocated, impaired, or even significantly curtailed.

With the benefit of hindsight Andy Flower gave his subsequent analysis, and it was within this I thought some really important messages could be transposed to the business world. In sport it’s often about rising for those singular moments, but in business it’s more important to achieve high performance that will be sustainable, rather producing the eye catching peaks that quickly burn out. This is his final assessment in the programme:

“To reach certain heights it does take a lot of sacrifice, but I don’t think it has to be that way, the way it ended, dropping very quickly. Was it worth it?”

“There was a lot of good to come out of that time, but I’m very realistic about the repercussions – good and bad – from those achievements. My own understanding of coaching and mental health issues is better, and the wiser we are, the more we understand this topic, the better English cricket will be.

I look back at some of the decisions I made with regret. If I had my time again, I’d definitely try to work with ‘the person’ as much as I did with ‘the player’, and understand the place that they were coming from”

To achieve this success in such as short space of time, Flower set a course that would stretch the players to the limits, physically and mentally. It was a case of only get on the bus if you’re willing to go the extra mile to achieve the goal. In was a pressure cooker environment, with nowhere to hide and no time for passengers who weren’t meeting the exacting standards. Even if team mates noticed one of their peers was struggling, life would quickly move on – eyes on the prize. When the summit had been reached, once the euphoria passed, with the anti-climax of ‘what now’, cracks began to emerge. What followed was heavy defeats, relationships souring with public spats, the team began to crumble and quickly world No.1 seemed a distant memory.  

There were two key messages that I thought stood out from this documentary, ones to be considered in the context of business leaders who need to drive their teams hard to achieve the business goals. In today’s climate this could simply be a case of having to do more with less, or face crises such as the global pandemic. Those ‘lucky’ enough to be in work will be coming under extreme pressure in many cases, with risks to their physical and mental wellbeing being more pronounced. This also applies in general though in business though, as with the team in the programme, as leaders overtly or inadvertently put their teams under huge pressure to realise their grand plans.

1. Look after the individual team member as a whole, not just in their ‘professional’ capacity

What felt so relevant about ‘The Edge’ was the focus on risk and reward, but in today’s business context it highlighted the aspects that need to be tended to in order to build sustainable high performance. The lesson Flower took from this was that it easy to become fixated on achieving the goal, and ignore how the team member is coping. The importance of mental health is growing in prominence in the business world, even more so during covid times as workforces have been dispersed and put under new strains. Physical health is beginning to bubble to the surface, and with so many operating in crisis mode, working more hours than usual, taking less holiday, confronting more and more ‘urgent’ matters, there is a real danger of burn out. Flower noted the importance to take more account of the personal wellbeing of your team member to support them in a way that allows them to shine for a longer period.

2. The responsible leader needs to properly assess if it’s going to be worth it?

We’ve all worked for that fiercely ambitious boss, or creative entrepreneur, who set high, aspirational targets and want (or demand) a team who’ll be on board to deliver the desired results. They can be great to work for, generating passion and providing inspiration. But are they ‘easy’ to work for? Often they will be very impatient, perhaps even a bit tunnel visioned on how and when things need to happen. At the roots their agenda may be self-motivated – to achieve a particular goal, be recognised for a particular achievement, and of course this creates opportunities for others to share in this success and develop valuable experience. But with such an agenda it’ll often be a case of proclaiming ‘get off the bus if you’re not up for this’. Flower’s observation was that having done this, being so single minded in the approach, whilst bringing the immediate results, it didn’t make for sustained success. 

In the pursuit of high achievement in business, be that to reach new heights, or save it in times of crisis, it is easy to fixate on the immediate goal and not give enough attention to what’s left once the summit has been reached. The rewards can be great, and charged by adrenaline individuals will willingly push through the pain threshold to play their part in the collective goal, deferring their attention from the risks to their wellbeing – be that burn out, anxiety, personal relationships etc.

Clearly business needs leaders who’ll create visions to inspire others, imagine new futures to spur innovation, raise expectations to drive higher performance. In ‘The Edge’, even those who suffered along the way still looked back proudly for being part of it, but in this climate, knowing what we know about the importance of wellbeing, bosses should take extra care to consider the toll their ambitions may take on their team, and be honest about it so people can make those decisions for themselves.

Ask the question – ‘will it be worth it?’. Consider the impact on those involved when assessing the risk & reward.

In the history books Flower and his team made an historic achievement, but it was interesting that upon posing this question to himself in the programme, Flower left it unanswered.