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The high-performance environments of Red Bull Racing and Silverstone were central to a development event designed and delivered by Leading Edge Performance for our multinational FMCG client’s Research & Development Leadership Team.
I was the Team Coach for their three-day event, building on a previous journey focusing on behaviours and purpose. This team play a vital role in getting new products to market within their organisation and have influence across design, testing, quality and production. They have huge accountability – along with the risk of reputational hit when things don’t go to plan or there’s a lack of clarity in the business around roles and responsibilities.
These senior leaders needed to clarify their profile within the business, focusing on what they wanted to be known for and what would define success for them. Upping efficiency as a team when together for meetings was also on the agenda.
Inspirational environments with real relevance
At Leading Edge Performance, we seek out incredible environments and locations that are highly relevant for the clients and teams we’re working with. The home of Red Bull Racing, in Milton Keynes, was spot on – a forward-looking company at the top of their technical game that gets products to market at speed. I heard a few “wows” as we entered the impressive event theatre, a colourful showcase of Red Bull F1 cars. Being in an environment that’s so different from the one we’re in day-to-day opens us up to new ways of thinking and doing things.
It was brilliant to see everyone in their element as they played with the drivers’ bespoke steering wheels, toured the state-of-the-art factory and heard from Red Bull’s Engineering Lead and Head of Mechanical Simulation about how they approach research and development: not fearing mistakes and moving at pace, all while continually looking forward and not being caught up with a need for formulised knowledge or documenting past ideas. This was refreshing and eye-opening for the team to hear.
They took away collective feelings of the need to move to an 80/20 way of thinking, to weaponise their data, and to be crystal clear with what ‘winning’ means for them as a senior team. This tapped into our stakeholder’s agreed event outcomes of needing to clarify the team’s profile and their definition of success.
The following day, we were at Silverstone – the legendary home of the British Grand Prix. When you book a conference room at Silverstone, you not only get a truly impressive view over the finish line but you also get to drive around the actual racetrack to get there! This went down very well with the team. Not to mention that they were able to spend their breaks watching Porsches fly round the track!
Leading Edge Performance focus on elevating client experience through environmental design, and the locations and outlooks chosen for this team provided interesting stimulus to encourage open conversation.
Building on the high-performance collaboration framework
With the finishing line just a glance away, we spent time exploring outputs from earlier discussions and activities, all aligned with the client’s high-performance collaboration framework. This provided a running thread for the event and guided discussions off the back of a pre-event diagnostic questionnaire of all six elements.
I based one session on Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team model, tasking the team to ‘look in the mirror’ and discuss how the five themes of inattention to results, avoidance of accountability, lack of commitment, fear of conflict and absence of trust show up in their team.
On our ‘State of the Nation’ walks, they talked about what they’re seeing in their roles and the trends, and what needs to be done. Tensions caused by being a matrixed team – one that reports both centrally/functionally and regionally – constantly pull them in opposing directions, meaning they avoid trying to resolve conflict or giving each other feedback, even though their strong desire is to be a cohesive, high-performing team.
Using the X and Y betting game activity, we focused on how, when everyone bets ‘X’, everyone gets a good outcome, but when some bet ‘X’ and some bet ‘Y’, only some win and it’s a worse outcome overall. I always enjoy running this activity. It’s a lovely way of saying “unless we’re all on the same page, we’ll stand on each other’s feet”, and it naturally opens up conversations about interdependencies and where it’s important to align or not important to align.
All the above prepped the team well for the closing activity at Silverstone: the Pitstop Challenge! This was perfectly suited to the team’s desire to work cohesively towards a shared goal and embrace what it means to win collectively.
They delivered some impressive performances and thoroughly deserved their time on the podium – a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Photos of them celebrating their success quickly circulated throughout the Senior Leadership Team’s internal comms channels, much to R&D’s delight!
