The Corporate Athlete

Do you know which is the quality that executives seek the most for themselves and their employees?

Sustained High Performance

Burnout has dramatically risen throughout the pandemic years. Employees urgently need to find boundaries to recover and be able to have a better balance in their full life integration. This will enable them to perform at higher levels in all aspects, both personal and professional.

In a recent McKinsey study, “42% of employees say they have been often or almost always burned out in 2021, compared to 32% a year ago”. As a result, the key question continues to be: why are there some people that flourish under pressure and others fold?

We believe that the key issue is that high performance is usually connected with the cognitive capacity. However, it has been demonstrated that there is also a connection between high performance and factors such as emotional intelligence and even the spiritual dimension.

However, almost no one has talked about the role played by the physical capacities.

The Corporate Athlete philosophy focuses on the theory that performance management needs to address the body, the emotions, the mind, and the spirit: This is the Performance Pyramid, with each level influencing the other to deliver or compromise high performance.

The High-Performance Pyramid

This line of thinking has its roots in the two decades that Jim Loehr and his colleagues at LGE spent working with world-class athletes, as a result they developed a more comprehensive version of these techniques for executives facing unprecedented demands in the workplace. Thus, they defined these executives as “corporate athletes.”

If they were to perform at high levels over the long haul, they would have to train in the same systematic, multilevel way that world-class athletes do.

The model has been tested on thousands of executives, dramatically improving work performance and enhanced health and happiness.

The Corporate Athlete philosophy focuses on learning how to build capacity in the four dimensions of energy:

  1. Physical
  2. Emotional
  3. Mental
  4. Spiritual

Furthermore, it talks about how effective energy management is achieved by balancing two key components:

  1. The rhythmic movement between energy expenditure (stress) and energy renewal (recovery), i.e., “oscillation”, and
  2. How to develop rituals to promote that oscillation and therefore build capacity to achieve high performance.

In a corporate environment that is changing at warp speed, performing consistently at high levels is more difficult and more necessary than ever. Narrow interventions simply aren’t sufficient anymore. Companies can’t afford to address their employees’ cognitive capacities while ignoring their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

On the playing field or in the boardroom, high performance depends as much on how people renew and recover energy as on how they expend it, and on how they manage their lives as much as on how they manage their work. When people feel strong and resilient—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—they perform better, with more passion, for longer.

They win, their families win, and the corporations that employ them win.

Interested to learn more about how The Corporate Athlete philosophy can help you and your organization achieve sustained performance? Contact us at talentdevelopment@grupoazimuth.com.