[00:01] Katie: Welcome to the Focus B show, where Katie Stoddart, high performance coach, interviews experts around the world in performance and mindfulness. Now here's your host. Katie.

[00:32] Katie: Welcome to the Focus B show. Today I'm here with Henrik Host, who has over 20 years experience in the fields of hive performance in different industries and in different countries. I'm really excited for you to be here today. Thank you for joining me.

[00:47] Henrik: Henrik thank you for having me, Katie. I look forward to speaking with you.

[00:51] Katie: One thing that we have in common is obviously our interest in high performance. And one topic that I find particularly interesting when it comes to high performance is how we can sustain such a level of performance over the long run. So I'm curious about your point of view on this, Henrik. What do you feel contributes to high levels of performance maintained over time?

[01:16] Henrik: That's a huge topic and a lot of points on that. And I think just a point pinpoint is is high performance once even interesting as opposed to the sustainability of it? So the repeatability of it, because you can have high performance in one quarter or one meeting or one off, which in some cases might be good. But I guess I'm particularly interested in how do you repeat it and maybe how do you scale it? And in these virus times, how do you infect people with the positive performance? Sustainability is really key. I also just as an idea around as well, it's like, so what does the word high mean and what does performance mean? And I guess you got to have a sense of, at least for yourself, if you're on your own or in your smaller team or a company, you have to agree on what high and performance is, because I'm pretty sure that if you give that question or pose that question to different people, they will have different views on what high is. For example, is high best in town, best in country, best in class? What are the performance elements that you need to look at? Is it just financial? Is it customer loyalty? The question around high performance definitely needs the word sustainability and how do you sustain it. But also you had to kind of get an idea of what high end performance is. And if I try to address maybe a couple of points around that as well, I think I've worked in industries where I try to get a lot of people to deliver high performance every Monday, assuming Monday is a tough day of the week, and even if it's raining outside or snowing. And I find that when I'm able to visualize for people what high performance looks like and people actually see it, it's a visual thing. It makes for a lot more sustainability. And this infection, in the positive sense of the word, is much, much easier to roll out. So often I ask, so what does perfect look like? If you are in the business of pleasing customers for some sort, what does perfect look like in the eyes of the customer? And if you ask that around the table or to your colleagues, you will initially have a lot of different views on that as well. So for me, getting a sense of what performance looks like is one thing and then the question of course comes into play around high because ultimately you could be world class. But I don't think that's sustainable in the long run. There's always going to be someone who will perform better and also it's a question of how much or high. High is good enough, cost efficient enough, because often says the evil of perfect is just too unobtainable. It's going to cost you a lot of stuff as well. So I think you need to kind of figure out what the words high and performance means in order to get this to be sustainability. I don't know if that makes sense, but at least that's my sense of it.

[04:29] Katie: I love all the different points you said here. So that you began with saying that high performance didn't make that much sense if it was just to be reached once and the repeatability of it is what matters most. So that's already a really good point because sometimes when we are striving towards a goal, we just think of the peak moment of the goal and then what? What's the point in training and running all the time to do a marathon and then just dropping, then you lose all levels of fitness and you've just done a marathon, it doesn't mean much. No, I love that aspect. And then you were talking about defining high performance. So which fields are we talking about and why does it matter and is it compared on a town level or country? And I think a lot of the times that's where the key is. It's the expectation. What are the expectations that we have in terms of high performance for ourselves or for our team? And if we don't have a clear definition, which is why I love you saying what does perfect look like? Because that's when you're defining it. If we don't have a clear definition, then how can we strive towards that?

[05:39] Henrik: If you're going to get things going on a long term basis, those questions need to be answered and I think you never really got to have those answers completed with two lines or markers underneath saying this is it. It's going to change as market changes as well. But I think that if you do that with your team or with yourself, it's pretty quickly done. You get like an 80 20 rule pretty quickly. And the question is that's good enough? In a sense? I found one thing which I think is it's? Of course not. Nothing Einstein, but if you work with teams, I don't think I have seldom seen financials PNL targets being what gets people up in the morning. I've seen people talk about this and I look around in the group, it might be registering somewhat in here, but it's not going into the heart. So it also has to be the high performance. I think for it to sustain, it needs to have a little bit here. It can definitely help the PNL and all those illogical stuff you want out of it. But if you skip this here, it doesn't last for long. One says that the grit muscle is a muscle, not something else. You wear it out. So you have to kind of get some additional superpower around it. And I think that's when you get the emotional part of it, especially if you're trying to create high performance for others than just yourself. And I'm sure that people have trying to motivate themselves, you'll have ups and downs and you need to kind of have access to why am I doing this, what's the reason? Not just for the bank account or something else.

[07:30] Katie: I love this. So tapping into the heart place, the emotional place to have that motivation and not just from a rational perspective of why it looks good or sounds good or financially it's profitable, but actually, why does it matter deep down, starting with why as Simon Sinek is often quoted for. So I'm wondering what have you noticed? What are the main factors that actually keep people motivated to sustain this performance? If it isn't the rational side and the financial side, what is it that really keeps them going?

[08:04] Henrik: This may vary from culture to culture, country to country. I worked across several markets and I found that this may vary a little bit as well. But speaking from call it maybe the Scandinavian approach with as well. I think that the fundamental stuff is that if I am going to deliver on high performance, I need to understand it. Not just being able to recite it, but understand it. What does it mean? What is high performance? Not so as a fundamental thing, it has to be this. I need to understand it. And maybe also this is probably also a little bit Scandinavian. I also need to buy into it. Do I believe it? I think that you can clearly be part of something that you aren't really fully bought into. But I think your highest performance will be obtained if you really bought into it. And this goes back to this in my view, the visualization part as well, understanding it. I think that also you need to understand how what you are working on fits into the bigger picture. So that for example, if you're part of a group, you need to understand what am I doing and how will that benefit them and vice versa. So that you may have a high performance thing going, but due to something else happening somewhere else in your company or with the customers, it gets nullified. It doesn't mean anything in a sense. So you need to have this broader picture of it all. And that's I guess why I love maps. I think it's a view you can always zoom back out and they said to me way back in my beginning of my career is when in doubt, revert to the big picture. And I think that's a key thing as well. That would be definitely where I started, would start and then I think going on that as well. There's always someone or some team who has been down that alley you're trying to go down before you and why not ask them for help or why not Google that? Or why not just what did someone else do? I don't think there's a lot of areas where you're going to find reinvent the wheel again. So there's this others have done something. So for example, if you're walking into a team, you're joining a new company or you're going to be a new supplier to a company, they've probably been searching for high performance perfection before. I would probably start some around what did you learn, what did you do? Because that gives you the upside of figuring out what might be the issues and have they actually tried what you want to do. And if that's the case, you probably need to be organizing your argumentation a little bit differently than the other way around. So just a three on top before we probably go a little bit into the stuff, but understanding what perfect looks like big picture and then investigating not just for 2 seconds but quite deep. Others have done this before me, what did they learn?

[11:14] Katie: Absolutely, I love this and I love the big picture and the maps. I think that knowing and understanding the bigger picture helps you to have that daily motivation. It's what I talk about when I talk about short term focus, what you do every day, and long term focus. And I always feel that short term focus is enhanced when long term focus is present. And so obviously short term focus is what you would call sort of high performance because it means on a daily basis you're delivering great results, but that actually contributes to the long term and the vision. I really love this big picture and looking how other people have managed this is also super interesting and also tapping into how you have managed it in the past. So there might be things, if you're joining a company again and you were in a previous company, what worked out well for you then? So a mixture of what worked for you in the past and what has worked for others I think is really nice.

[12:09] Henrik: And I have a retail background and I guess that even though way back there was no online, but I still think that this customers queen, customers King perspective is really good and I think that when you sitting down and figure out what is high performance? Spending some time with your customers, the ones you have or the ones you want, and trying to figure out, what do they want, what do they need, and then go back and kind of reverse engineer stuff and say, okay, this is what they want to need. Okay, what does that mean if I just fold this back towards my value chain? Because sometimes people tend to say, okay, I have this great idea, and you kind of want others to buy into it. You're assuming that your great idea is what they're looking for. So I think this reverse engineering backwards is a key thing. I think if you continue to ask about this high performance stuff as well, I think that there's a couple of things that has to be kind of a prerequisite for success. I think there's absolutely no way for high performance to be sustained if you don't add diversity into your mix. I'm a huge fan of that. I've probably seen where diversity doesn't work, and it might be enjoyable to have people around the table who are just like you because things go faster, but at the end of the day, you don't deliver a lot of stuff. So this diversity, whether it is if you're a woman or a man, if you are from this country, from that country, education, background, diversity. And I guess my big thing is really the diversity in ideas and experiences. But if you have diversity around the table, but there is a sense of fear, or I can't truly speak my mind, or if I say something, the guy on the corner there will smile, this weird smile. So I don't want that. I don't think he really wants to hear it. People will shut up. And I think it's impossible to get the high performance label one to do if people in your team or yourself feel a little bit unsure of how honest can I be? And that, of course, is a question of when you, for example, go into teams and companies like, I recently left a company, I probably should have vetted that company more when it came to the idea of how fond are you of different viewpoints, how acceptable are you of people who fail? Do you help them pick up or do you prefer conformity? So I think that's a number one element around it. I don't know what your view on that is, but I think that everything else we talk about kind of falls short if I'm part of something, and I'm going just to kind of keep quiet and just go with the flow, because ultimately, then the people with the best ideas don't necessarily win out.

[15:07] Katie: That's a very interesting point. And what I'm hearing from what you're saying is diversity is important, but the open mindedness of the people. So the more diversity is fantastic, and it contributes to different ideas and points of view, but also the more open minded you are, the more receptive you are to other people's idea. And then that directly leads to communication within the team. So the higher the level of communication, the more freely people can speak and open up and give ideas, the higher the performance because then all the ideas merge together and it gets more creative and brainstorming and that leads to better results for sure, because if people are blocked, they can't share it. And then it can also lead to this competitive aspect between employees and that's obviously detrimental to performance because it goes to individualistic performance compared to the whole and the group, which is obviously more powerful.

[15:59] Henrik: I think there's this old Chinese saying if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I think there's something in there and I think that this high performance sustainability is clearly about going far and together element of it all. And also if you sit around and you're wondering, okay, well, that's a fair point. Being trusted and having a trusting environment is important. How do I figure that one out? And I think it's a great trick that I've always used and which was actually amplified when I was with Microsoft is call it lost review. You could always call it win review, but loss review, let's say you have an account that you lost or something didn't work. One question is do you have lost reviews or is that something that pops up ad hoc or is it like a regular frequency part of it? Is it ad hoc or is it not? And also when you have lost reviews, how much do you peel the is it we lost, it good stuff, move on, or do you really peel it? I think that gets a good sense of it as well. So the idea of peeling the onion and you get a little bit of tears going on. And also if you have, for example, your boss, if she or he sits there and doesn't really want to peel his onion or her onion, that's a good sign of okay, well, this is not probably where we go, but it's a good place to start. The best insights is what you've done. I'm sure that if you are a professional athlete, you do review what you've done. We all accept that they do that. But if you are working in the business, we are business athletes, but we tend to not be too willing to do that as well. And I'm a big fan of rhythm of business. I just like the idea that there is a cadence to rhythm. And if you see that either your company doesn't have a loss review or doesn't even have that kind of cadence, maybe adding it will help setting the groundworks for high performance because this moves into the point of saying, okay, it's lost review. Not to kind of weep of what we lost, but it's truly about the learning part. And that moves into the topic of growth mindset, where you really have to be hungry for figuring out what didn't work because you probably have more info about how to succeed in what didn't work than trying to find out what more can I do to win?

[18:29] Katie: Very interesting point. It's interesting that you call this lost review. I would probably call it lessons learned, but I suppose it's the same thing. And everywhere I seem to hear every single Ted Talk book I read, everything I read seems to be about what we learned through failure and how much resilience we get and the essential points and all the people who have succeeded have failed. And in one of Tim Ferriss books, he asked them, what was your major failure? Or one of them? And it's incredible. Some are huge, like huge failures where you think you wouldn't be able to sort of stand up and keep on going afterwards. And they often say that it's thanks to that failure that they made it right.

[19:09] Henrik: And there's lessons learned, I think is a great word as well. But it's as if when you have lost review, it becomes a little bit more at least my pulse is a little bit more humping along as opposed to lessons learned. Because sometimes people tend to use learning. We have to learn. You have to learn as a way to excuse or kind of sparkle over issues. I like it to be a little bit go down into details. And I think that if you are a manager, you need to be the one who goes first. And of course, if you take that go on and you talk further on, what are some of the things that I've learned in terms of high performance is the presence of a regular rhythm of business feedback. You know, people, they want positive feedback. Henrik that was good. I liked what you said and ultimately you know that. But you're not going to really push your performance further by hearing what they think was okay. So you have to kind of go back and go into the elements of what could I have done differently? So I think that, first of all, as a person, are you willing to have this type of feedback? And also, who do you ask feedback from? Is it your favorite cheerleader or is it your person you trust challenge you? Henrik that idea really isn't that great. I don't understand it. You know what I'm saying? So I think this feedback part is important. And I find that too many companies, too many people, they skip that. And I think that the feedback and the feedback can't be twice a year. So, for example henrik hey, in March, just before COVID came along, that's history. It's perishable goods. It needs to be feedback right now. And it's how you do it. And again, it goes back to trust as well. But that's an element which I find extremely valuable for high performance.

[21:15] Katie: Yes, feedback. Essential, essential, essential. And I think it's nice to have it both from an external perspective, so whether it's a coach, a mentor, or your manager, and also internal perspective. So when you're doing a weekly review or monthly review yourself, feedback, how is it compared to last month? How did you feel, what results did you achieve? And going towards sort of more individual performance, because we've talked a lot about teams and working in companies and as myself, I am like a one woman show. I wonder, how do you think individual people, so people that are entrepreneurs or have their own business, what can help them sustain performance?

[21:56] Henrik: Well, first of all, I think having talked about this before we went on the show here, I think there's a lot of similarities between team and individual. I think that the same caller toolbox will be there. Obviously, it demands more of yourself. I think that check number one is basically I'm a big fan of the word algorithm. So you kind of have to, on your own, figure out what's the algorithm that I'm going to try to employ as often as I can in order for me to deliver high performance. And I think that just taking the zoom back from Map and taking a look at the different elements is an important part of your stuff as well. But I think there's a point where self talk stops. You can listen to the Tim Ferrisses or something else as well. But I think ideally, whether you're on your own, you have a network. And I think recruiting a network, and I would argue that the challenge network there is an extremely important part. I know that there's Adam Grant Work Life Balance podcast for those who haven't listened to he talks about that. I think it's a fantastic one and I've used it more and more. So when you're on your own, who can you reach out to? Not too often, obviously, but basically take a look at this is an idea I'm thinking about. Or for example, let's say you're on your own and you go to your first sales pitch. Can you bring someone along and will you ask him or her after the fact to kind of feedback, give feedback as well? Sports person has a coach and the coach that you talk to needs to see you performing. If not, they'll hear you review whatever you did and they'll respond to that as well. So I think that the points that I mentioned about the team applies to the person you need to do that. You have your Monday morning meetings, you have your review meetings with yourself, but you also need to kind of put a network on top of that every now and then who aren't your biggest fans.

[24:15] Katie: That's a great point. I think I probably have found that myself personally in coaches, because coaches tend to be quite neutral and some were very supportive coaches and others were more sort of challenging. But the really valid point that you made is that they need to see you perform. So whether it's sales, whether they're supervising your own coaching sessions, whether it's checking how you're managing your social media, and a lot of the times with coaches, you're feeding back to them what you feel is going well or isn't going well and looking for new ideas. So it's interesting to take into account the fact that you might need someone that has this external perspective that's not your biggest fan and that's actually looking, how are you performing in these different.

[24:59] Henrik: Areas, but people wanting to help you? And I find that most people are really eager to help. And so let's say you reach out to some people that you want to kind of have as a child network as well. You could argue, hey Katie, can't you just take a look at what I'm doing? That's a very broad and tall order, but you can say, listen, I'm trying to improve on these in these areas. And right now it's the improvement month on public speaking or closing a sales or whatever the story is. Could you take a look at that and just view that point so it doesn't become too generic? But I think in going back to the word algorithm, if you think a little bit of this as a software algorithm, in a sense, meaning that it never goes to sleep, you might be looking at certain part of your algorithm code. That doesn't mean a lot of improvement is needed, but it's a little bit of shift. And I think that a big fan of Lean. It's like even if this has always worked for you, if you don't reverse and return to it and look at it, at some point what was delivering high performance is going to kind of just become average performance. So you want to be kind of updating your software algorithm in chunks and looking for the 10% improvement on an occasional basis. And you do that when others see you. One of the things that when I sometimes find that it's tough to kind of perform well, I sometimes change my environment. I will, for example, okay, I need to be really thinking hard about something. I will then move myself into library where basically talking is not important. It's basically, okay, I'm here and I'm going to kind of focus on this one as well. So sometimes just changing the scenery of where you work will help a lot as well. So that's an idea as well.

[27:02] Katie: I love this and I really love this analogy with algorithm. Having studied math and used to be an engineer, anything that's mathematically related, I love. And I think it's very tempting once you found a good algorithm, to stick at it and then you realize after a while that it doesn't work anymore. And you need to upgrade it and you need to add that 10%. And I feel this is the case in all areas of life. Same if you're exercising what exercise routine was for you a bit challenging at first, do it for three, four months. It's not challenging anymore. And you're probably not really improving and you're maybe maintaining the level, if that so I think taking the habit to regularly review both from an external perspective, internal perspective, how you're doing in these different areas, what algorithms are you using or how can you tweak it to slightly improve your performance every time. It's part of the lean methodology, right?

[27:54] Henrik: It is in the part of the career where it's actually becoming extremely motivating to try to offer a little bit of advice to people who are in the earlier part of their career. But regardless of where you are, I think that the one way to kind of keep you sharp is to share what you've learned. Because basically, like, for example, before this talk as well, I've thought about this for many, many years. But ultimately trying to structure it, articulate it, it makes it so much more vivid in my mind that it basically becomes a rejoiting what's jolting of what I've done. So basically, if you are asked by someone, someone who's new or different, hey, could you do that? Do that volunteer? As long as the person on the other side of the table is willing to listen and willing to put in the time and not just want you to do the work for them. But I also think that sharing some of your stuff as well and this is when it comes to sharing, this is where I find that people who are leaders, whether it's just an individual person who leads through others or infects others to do things well. Or if you leader a larger team is if you aren't able to share your vulnerabilities about what I did and what did wrong and how it hurt and what I did to fix it. I don't think that they haven't really peeled the onion as well. And I've worked for too many people who are bosses, who are allergic to sharing. Weakness. I see weakness as just a step in the right direction for high performance. So I think this sharing with others and wanting to open up, obviously you want to have a trust there as well. It's a fantastic way of training yourself, kind of being your own coach, but coaching others and having them react to what you think.

[29:56] Katie: Absolutely. And I think it also adds an element of understanding because people, if, for example, it's their boss or their manager, they might see them in this superior position, they might feel inferior or intimidated. But if they share their weaknesses, they think, oh, they're just like us. They've just worked on these weaknesses. This is what they've done, this is what I can do. It inspires. Them. It makes everyone feel human. So this vulnerability is definitely an extra asset and not a negative thing. For sure.

[30:26] Henrik: For sure. And I think high performance, you don't go from low performance to high performance in a very short time frame, at least from a sustainability perspective. You might be able to have a bad game and a great game, but if you think about it as a long game. So I think that the idea about how do you script the moves. So basically there's a staircase from not so great performance to the high performance you want. It's not just one huge trying to dissect what are the different staircase steps that they did. And I always find it great that if you make sure that don't just talk about it from an academic perspective, but also from an example. So tell me about a time when you need to do this and that and have them kind of respond back in live case examples, because it's a lot easier to remember that type of story than bullet points from a business book which you've read or heard about a thousand times. But scripting the moves and let's say you go out and you want to get high performance coaching from someone who's done that before, going back to asking what does perfect look like? And you will be surprised how often people have kind of wandered into high performance without really understanding what perfect looks like. And I think that the high performance could be even better and more sustainable if they'd had this picture perfect vision in it.

[32:04] Katie: I find I think this is a lovely way to sort of conclude the podcast because we've come back to the perfect. So it's like we've done a whole tour and we've looked right now the different steps we can go through to help us to reach that level. Anything you'd like to add before we finish? And also maybe if you could share where people can find you, that would be great.

[32:24] Henrik: Well, I think that this is something that is with you all the time and I think it's something that you should be interested, I think, in order to be relevant, whether you are in your early part of career or in your late part of career, I think high performance will always be the case. The definition of high performance will change and obviously my performance will be different now at my age when I started. But this hunt for high performance, this curiosity for high performance is something that one should have regardless of what age you are in. And I think I would recommend people to kind of zoom in on a topic of growth mindset. It's Carol Dweck. She's a professor, psychology out of Stanford. It's a fantastic, fairly understandable topic. Works well if you have kids and everything as well. I was with Microsoft for several years and the way they went from this fixed mindset to the growth mindset. I think it's a very good foundation for high, consistent performance. It's a topic that, regardless of AI, it would always be so. And if people want to get in touch with me, being a former Microsoft, it's LinkedIn. They bought it for fairly expensive money, so it's easiest to get a hold of a message through LinkedIn.

[33:49] Katie: Great. So Henry hosts on LinkedIn love this about fixed and growth mindset. I might do an entire other episode on this with someone. Also, it's a really fascinating topic on its own. Thank you so much for being here today, Henrik. And thank you for sharing all of this. I really appreciate it.

[34:04] Henrik: Thank you.

[34:05] Katie: Bye for now.

[34:08] Katie: Thank you for listening to the Focus B show. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know in a review how this episode inspired you. Keep buzzing that's.