When Things Go Wrong: What Failure, Conflict and Coaching Can Teach Us About Leadership

By definition, the people that you're working with already are high performers or they're aspirational high performers by virtue of engaging with you in the first place.

What behaviors and habits do you see that distinguish those high performers from the ones that don't become such?

I think there's two things.

The first is focus.

So high performers have focus.

They know what they want to achieve and what the steps are to get themselves there.

And the second is they have an ecosystem around them to support them.

So all the high performers I know, they've got a way that they keep themselves healthy to the balance that's right for them.

So there's the old phrase isn't there about work hard, play hard.

And people who are high performers that I know, they tend to invest heavily in a range of other things.

Now, depending on what that range is, it varies by person, but it might be personal fitness.

It might be their marriage.

It might be their kids.

But they're full on in other places apart from their work.

And To me, it seems to give them the right balance so that they can kind of focus very intensively on work-based tasks, but also switch off and refresh their brain doing something else.

So it's that ability to switch between two at a similar intensity that I think high performance people do.