Coming Round the Last Bend – are you ready to ELBA?
Whichever way you turn you cannot get away from sporting inspired nostalgia at the moment. As well as the anniversary of the London Games Opening Ceremony, there was the 50 years since the 1966 World Cup victory for England. This latter has a particular resonance in east London due to the sentiment that it was “West Ham that won it”.
Listening to the various interviews of the players from that era, I got the very strong message that the team was more important than individual talent. Well, there is an obvious lesson for the world of work that hardly needs expanding on. But I cannot get away from the feeling that no matter how much emphasis we rightly put on the team, there is something required in each individual if the team is going to be successful. Each has got to find the personal motivation to perform at the top level – to be the best they can be. For some, finding that from within themselves is easy, for others it can be harder to find. For young people from tougher backgrounds it might need the input from a “significant other” adult to help them over a few hurdles. It might take quite a few goes before it comes right – and one of our mantras here at ELBA is that every young person deserves a second chance, and a third and fourth…. Ultimately everyone has to find their own source of strength and determination, particularly if they are going to adopt any kind of leadership role.
Increasingly, ELBA business partners are linking the employer supported volunteering that they do with us back to their leadership and management development programmes. It has long been the case that volunteering and community involvement is recognised as a good way to develop wider competencies and people skills, but wouldn’t it be interesting to go further and link volunteering to specific accredited units from the Management Charter Initiative or something similar. That would bring in the idea of some volunteering opportunities attracting more “credit” than others – ELBA Plus and ELBA Extreme as we have started to call it here. Of course there is nothing new under the sun and there is lots of pre-existing research to pull out and look at afresh. It will be interesting to widen out the concept to look at the personal attributes as well as skills required for leadership at all levels – determination, resilience, empathy, clarity of purpose.
Which brings us back to taking inspiration from sport. I remember very clearly the moment when I was inspired to get involved in the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. It was the Athens Olympics, and Kelly Holmes was coming around the last bend in the 800m. The BBC commentator lost it a little in his enthusiasm and so did I as she stormed home for Gold. The next day I determined with a client of my business that we were going to play a part in the London bid for the Games, no matter how small. Kelly Holmes is a particularly inspiring role model as she overcame adversity in the form of injury and ill-health to reach her career achievement. Strength and determination in spades.
Of course it doesn’t work for everybody. A much respected colleague told me this week that they thought the London Games had been “a waste of money”. Dropped jaws and incredulity all round. That’s definitely not ELBA.
