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Have you been forwarded the DARE High Performance newsletter? You can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

This Week’s DARE at a Glance:

Thought Of The Week: High performance demands specificity - not generics.

Prisoners, HR Posters, Olympians and Netflix: Specific rules for a shared culture of accountability and change.

Book of the Week: Stephen R Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’.

My Week: A joy to return to Manchester and thrilled to be back in the room with Superdrug/Savers.

Thought of the Week:

High performance is designed, so high-performers don’t rely on generic ideals.

They design specifically for the moments when those ideals will be tested.

Prisoners, HR Posters, Olympians and Netflix.

In the 90’s, Stephen Covey took his ‘7 Habits’ philosophy into prisons. He wanted to test whether character-based training could change lives that were broken.

Covey didn’t do this for PR—he believed deeply that once inmates realised they could choose their path, they would begin to reshape their lives long before release. He taught both inmates and wardens the same principles, creating a shared culture of accountability and change.

His results deliver optimism for all of us: and also a warning for those seeking High Performance.

Recidivism was estimated to drop from around 70% to as low as 8%, and in-prison incident reports plummeted by over 75%.

The optimism continues:

When inmates were asked to name the core values they wished to live by as a community, they gave a familiar list: Respect, Honesty, Responsibility, Integrity.

Doesn’t that show something just wonderful about our shared human spirit, even when people are close to breaking and with much hope removed?

And doesn’t it also deliver a massive warning about corporate values? Do those words remind you of a poster or a ‘cascaded’ slide-pack?

High Performance Demands Specificity - Not Generics.  

Specificity is the difference between a feel-good community and an agile organism designed specifically to deliver specific high-performance RESULTS.

Take Rio Olympic Champions, the Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens Team.

In their prep for Rio, they designed their High Performance. Specific rules for chaos — how to react under breakdown - Agreed calls to reset structure instantly - Immediate support triggers if a teammate faltered.

They Contracted them. Trained them. Lived them. Rehearsed them.

And when it counted, they won Olympic gold, beating New Zealand 24–17 in the 2016 Rio final—the first Olympic title in women’s rugby sevens history.

Their values weren’t painted on a wall. They were built into specific ‘rules’ of behaviour, especially in moments of fatigue, stress, and pressure.

At Netflix, a culture famously designed with the specific end in mind, the culture deck states:

“The reward for adequate performance is a generous severance package”

That is ‘honest’. It has ‘integrity’. It ‘respects’ both the high performing ‘keepers’ and those that were hired in error. It is also brutally specific.

According to CEO Reed Hastings, this brutal specific challenge to Netflix employees also radically increases the calibre of applications from top talent!

When I work with leadership teams to create specific high performing team contracts, we see a HUNGER to design specific behaviours that unite the team, deliver the results AND give them permission to challenge the lack of integrity, respect and honesty that exists despite the values posters.

Book Jim To Speak.

Do we bin the values? Of course not.

If you want change: define the values. But don’t stop there.

Design the behaviours that make those values real under stress. Contract them. Practise them. Rehearse them like plays, so they’re automatic under pressure.

This is what elite teams do. It’s what you can do. And if you want help to do it, the team and I are here for you.

Book Of The Week.

The book of the week this week has to be Stephen Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People', of course!

This and ‘The Road Less Travelled’ by M Scott Peck were game changers for me in my thirties, deeply affected my Decisions, Actions and Results in that decade and have become embedded since. I remember vividly where I was sitting as I read them and how confused I was, to begin with, by their message.

Don’t be fooled by the publication date. The messages are as timely today as they were in 1989.

My Week.

For those lucky to have had the opportunity to attend a university, the City remains special for all time, don’t you agree? This week I returned to the scene of many joys in my youth: Manchester. The place where I gained my Bachelor of Laws.

I was the guest of Leonard Curtis, Legal, Restructuring and Funding advisors with an outstanding commercial edge and a wonderful energy: Forward with Purpose is their mantra and it was a pleasure to mix DARE with their strategy to generate Action.

To Silverstone and Whittlebury Hall to bring DARE to one of the UK’s most loved retailers, Superdrug/Savers as they continue their (already well-established) high-performance journey in a retail environment that many are finding too challenging.

How do we create an environment where DARE can be brought to life? Where new Actions are encouraged and ambitions are raised daily? Through our team leaders!

So I head to Munich in 10 days as we launch the program I’ve been designing for one of Europe’s fastest growing software companies’ Team Leaders, bringing them High Performance Coaching skills to deliver outstanding Results. Finishing touches were added this week.

And next week? DARE and I are off to Toronto, Canada. I will report back.

Write your story 🖋️

Jim