Last Monday I met a chap who held his office record for eating packets of crisps. Thirty-six in a day which, as someone who likes to look after his body, I wasn’t really that impressed with. A round 50 would have been more impressive but still, at least it’s a goal for others to target. If they had an Olympic attitude at work his colleagues would surely rise to the junk food Challenge?

This chap was probably about 35, had children and was carrying a few extra pounds (of crisps) and so in what way is having an Olympic attitude relevant to him? The truth is that whilst competing in the Olympics, let alone winning a medal, of any colour, is only achieved by a tiny percentage of people, we can all adopt the mindset, attitude and behaviours associated with Olympic performance. We can all perform to the best of our ability, we can all seek to make the most of our talent, we can all seek to learn and improve and we can all seek to change in order to become the best that we can be in whatever line of work we do.

Having an Olympic attitude at work starts with taking responsibility for your own performance. That means that you don’t make excuses or blame others for what you do or for the Results you get and that while the outcome of your efforts is really, really important, you recognise that input delivers those Results, and so you focus on those, and you include your attitude as one of those inputs. Thinking like this means that you don’t “have a bad day” but you “do a bad day”.

HR can sometimes get in the way. Unfortunately corporate strategies, policies, structures and hierarchies can often get in the way of workers taking responsibility for their own performance. One of our coaches once overheard a salesperson telling a client that where he worked: “we’ve been given responsibility for our own development”. That sounded like progress but our coach wondered at what point the salesperson had given away that responsibility. We recently heard a senior HR team within one of our client firms discussing a colleague who was: “on the verge of a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)”, and not in a good way.

Can you imagine an Olympic athlete whose performance has become so poor that they resort to a performance improvement plan? No chance. Such will be their desire to make the most of their talent and maximise it, to seek improvement in what they are already good at and to play to their strengths, and to learn and seek feedback at every opportunity, that they will be living and breathing performance improvement every day without resorting to a PIP!!!! It’s an example of HR, management and the business consciously or not, seeking to own performance and in so doing taking ownership from individuals and teams (in a similar way we see the setting of individual targets eroding mutual accountability in teams. Too frequently team targets have become the target of the team leader rather than the shared target of the team and its constituent members).

So the Olympic attitude is many things, but when it comes to learning we could take an example from Lord Coe who said recently that elite performers crave feedback, and their attitude is: “if you know something about my performance that would make me better, and you don’t tell me, then you are letting me down”. If everyone had that attitude in work would performance improve?

For most people, the majority of their development time is focused on acquiring new knowledge and developing and refining skills. Yet most would acknowledge that mindset plays a huge part in how they apply themselves and what they do, and hence in what Results they get. How many people spend time developing their attitude in a conscious and deliberate manner designed to maximise their chances of success?

For example, elite sportspeople recognise the value of confidence, they talk about it, and they work on it to help maintain it and make it robust. Confidence doesn’t get talked about in the business world other than the confidence of investors or market traders (or lack of it), but rarely is it talked about openly on a personal level. Individual conversations about confidence usually only take place with trusted partners outside of work or in crisis situations. If confidence is important to you, when did you last work on it?

On the physical side how many people are 100% committed to their jobs and put in the hours and the effort to achieve great things for themselves and their business, and yet wilfully underperform. That is they make choices that they know will impact their ability to carry out their role, such as missing breakfast or lunch, not drinking enough, going to bed too late, allowing themselves to get run down.

Many corporate well-being policies are about avoiding illness and stress, which is the bare minimum we should be looking to achieve and misses a trick. It is the equivalent of an athlete achieving the qualifying standard for the Olympics and then not turning up. We think that looking after yourself physically is about making sure you have the right energy at the right times and can be controlled with a little thought and planning. If you do these things it reduces the chances of getting stressed and falling into the traps of weekends being the time when you try to catch up on sleep and Christmas being the time when you get ill. For many, the gap between what they know and what they do represents an opportunity and a potential quick win.

Mental and physical aspects are but two of the factors that can make a difference. And a one percent difference here and a two percent difference there can add up to a significant difference. For those open-minded, curious and flexible enough to start exploring their own mindset there could be discoveries which ultimately enable them to set new standards by doing what they can do, but don’t. And we’re not talking junk.