In this article

Explore our virtual leadership development options to meet your current needs.

In about 90% of our conversations with clients, the first question we’re asked is “what can you deliver remotely?” And – the answer is ‘a lot!’ We’ve spent the past six months transforming our product line and, since April, we’ve had more than 5,000 learners go through our programs remotely – from webinars on leading remotely for 500+ people, to immersive 6-week learning journeys to Coaching mastery for smaller cohorts, to building resilience skills in the EMBA class at Queen’s Smith School of Business.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Depending on your goals for virtual learning, different approaches are required. We’ve taken a ‘small / medium / large’ approach to our product development to meet the needs of a variety of scenarios:

 Large Group Experiences

Webinars or a-synchronous content to spark ideas and motivation for groups of any size.

 Targeted Group Programs

Learning journeys that integrate video, synchronous learning, 1:1 coaching and application to build mastery for up to 49 people.

 In-depth Cohort Programs

Half-day interactive instructor-led sessions for up to 18 people to build core skills.

Whatever your needs – we’re likely to have a virtual solution that hits the mark in terms of depth, duration and class size.

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Timeless skills + the right tools for right now

Of course, we have a range of virtual options in our core competencies: coaching skills for managers, resilience skills for all, and self-awareness skills to enable more productive collaboration. And, we are continuously launching virtual programs that give learners the skills they need to be successful right now. Note that we are continuously developing new offers (and adapting our in-person programs to virtual delivery) so this list will be updated as new programs come online.

Coaching skills for managers

The 3×4 Coaching model explores the 3 plays and 4 skills consistently executed by world-leading coaches.

We have a full range of options for bringing our industry-leading 3×4 Coaching model to life virtually – with a specific eye to how to coach in a virtual environment.

In-depth Cohort Programs

3×4 Coaching Virtual Learning Journey

Coaches are leaders who do all they can to help people improve and succeed. It is a way of thinking and interacting with people that communicates high expectations, respect and caring. In this 4 – 6 week (depending on your desired pace) virtual program, individuals learn the concepts and skills of a coaching style of management that builds commitment, drives employee engagement, gets results, and integrates this learning into the flow of their work.

Get a feel for the learning experience in this 3-minute video overview of the program.

Targeted Group Programs

Coaching Remotely 1/2-day Virtual Program

Coaches are leaders who do all they can to help people improve and succeed. It is a way of thinking and interacting with people that communicates high expectations, respect and caring. In this 4 – 6 week (depending on your desired pace) virtual program, individuals learn the concepts and skills of a coaching style of management that builds commitment, drives employee engagement, gets results, and integrates this learning into the flow of their work.

Having Challenging Conversations from a Distance 1/2-day Virtual Program

Our practical, 4-step map for challenging conversations is rooted in our 25 years of experience helping elite athletes manage emotions under intense pressure. Participants explore methods of preparing to confront, learn an effective format for an opening statement, practice managing reactivity and discuss how to close the conversation with accountability built-in.

Large Group Experiences

3×4 Coaching Overview Webinar

Learning coaching skills is the best way to dramatically increase your people’s commitment level and performance. This interactive 1-hour online session starts your powerful coaching journey.

3×4 Coaching Asynchronous Video Program

The 3×4 Coaching Video Program is a self-paced, asynchronous learning journey that unpacks the 3 plays and 4 skills of exceptional coaches. It provides learners with a powerful, easy-to-understand model for coaching people to higher levels of results and engagement.

Watch a brief sample of the 3×4 Coaching video program

Resilience skills for all

Building Resilience is aimed at giving participants a toolkit of inner skills to navigate their high pressure realities.

Rarely has resilience been as relevant as it is right now. We take our 30+ years of experience in resilience, and bring it to life in a way that gives people the insight and skills needed right now.

In-depth Cohort Programs

Building Resilience Virtual Learning Journey

The virtual Building Resilience program synthesizes 30 years of science-backed and performance-proven strategies into a practical toolkit that participants can use to stay healthy under pressure and recover when they are thrown off balance. Our approach to resilience draws on work in elite sport, teaching and research in academia, and work with thousands of people in organizations of all sizes. Building Resilience is a transformative experience that allows participants to learn in the flow of work while changing the way they relate to pressure.

Targeted Group Programs

Building Resilience 1/2-day Virtual Program

A leader’s ability to stay resilient through setbacks and be predictable under pressure is the #1 indicator of how their team will weather the storm. Learn practical techniques for staying even-keeled when it matters most in this 1/2-day online workshop.

Large Group Experiences

Building Resilience Overview Webinar

This online session equips participants with an understanding of how uncertainty and pressure impact their performance and health, an awareness of the choices they have to enhance their resilience under pressure, and a guided, applied exercise that will specifically tackle how they are framing and taking direct action on the areas that will most impact their performance and resilience.

Topical skills leaders need right now

Our Maintaining Team Motivation Through The Troughs program teaches leaders four allies for fighting disillusionment.

A collection of fit-for-purpose programs that address hot button issues like motivation through prolonged periods of uncertainty, challenging conversations from a distance, and the imperative for agility and personal ownership over re-skilling.

Targeted Group Programs

Maintaining Team Motivation Through the Troughs 1/2-day Virtual Program

As the pandemic drags on, maintaining motivation and engagement will become a primary challenge for leaders. Learn practical techniques to keep people energized, resilient and motivated, inspired by Olympic coaches and athletes, in this 1/2-day online workshop.

Large Group Experiences

The Meta-Skilled Organization

Meta-skills are the connective tissue that allow people and organizations to let go of the skills that have anchored their successful past and master and embrace new ways of working – in other words, to evolve. Packed with ideas on both how to foster the development of meta-skills for yourself, and how to build meta-skilled organizations as stewards of talent, this keynote lays out a framework for six key meta-skills that allow individuals and organizations to see clearly, move quickly, and stay the course.

Self-awareness & collaboration

The “player’s card” is one of our favourite tools for helping learners translate self-awareness to communication and action.

The Attentional and Interpersonal Styles Inventory (TAIS) was originally developed to help Olympic athletes and elite military units optimize performance in high-pressure situations. Every day, these individuals must make critical decisions under pressure with less than perfect information. Since its introduction, business leaders have recognized that their people face similar, if not identical, problems and have made the TAIS their assessment of choice. Our work with the TAIS and fostering self-awareness has never been more vital – or easier to deliver. 1:1 coaching and self-awareness work is a natural fit for a virtual environment.

Targeted Group Programs

The Self-Aware Leader Virtual Program

The Self-Aware Leader program combines the TAIS assessment, three one-on-one coaching sessions, the creation of a personal action plan to address a real business challenge, an ability to chart your progress and adjust your approach through the guidance of a coach. It will help leaders understand and leverage their strengths under pressure and identify what changes if made, would matter the most.

Large Group Experiences

TAIS Assessment + 1:1 Coaching

Whether you want to build self-awareness for a few executives or all of your people managers, the TAIS can help them identify environments and performance situations in which they will thrive and excel, when and how they are most likely to make mistakes and what they can do to ensure you will perform well under pressure. Participants receive an individual report detailing 18 personal styles as they relate to attention, information, leadership, social and communication and have the opportunity to build further clarity with a 1:1 coaching call.

Let’s talk!

If you’re interested in any the above – or anything that you don’t see here – let’s chat! You can get in touch at hello@thirdfactor.com.
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Get a complete overview of our coaching, collaboration and resilience programs.

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Negative emotion is an incredibly volatile fuel. Our CEO, Dane Jensen, lays out how to harness its energy for building motivation in his latest article for Harvard Business Review titled Turn Your Team’s Frustration into Motivation. In the article, Dane offers three tools for leaders to motivate people facing a setback:

🏷 Label the negative emotion and engage. Right or wrong, giving it a name helps uncover important information that can be used for moving forward. 👏 Feed the self-coach, not the self-critic. Encourage them to look for the opportunity in the crisis. 🛴 Channel energy to action. Use the moment to build a vision of a better future and build clarity around what it takes to get there.

Strong leaders don’t shy away from negative emotions. They lean into them and help their people use them to recover and grow. Click here to read the article on hbr.org. Resilience – the ability to grow through pressure, recover and respond in the face of setbacks, and perform under pressure – is a skill learned in the troughs, not the peaks. As a result of COVID-19, employees and managers are facing changes in pretty much every aspect of their work – what they need to do, how it needs to get done, where they need to do it from – and also facing the spectre of potentially significant impacts to compensation and results. There hasn’t been a time since 2008 in which resilience is more necessary or more top-of-mind.
Further reading: COVID-19: Ways Forward for Learning & Development
In the face of this tremendous uncertainty and need for resilience, we’ve developed a 60 minute, interactive, virtual, instructor-led session that will equip participants with an understanding of how uncertainty and pressure impact their performance and health, an awareness of the choices they have to enhance their resilience under pressure, and a guided, applied exercise that will specifically tackle how they are framing and taking direct action on the areas that will most impact their performance and resilience over the coming few months. Participants will leave with a better understanding of what they can control, what they need to let go of, and how they can approach the current and coming uncertainty in a way that maximizes their resilience. As an organization, providing your people with the skills to navigate this period will build engagement and signal a strong commitment to their growth, development and well-being. The coming few months may not be enjoyable, but with the right tools everyone can emerge with the satisfaction of knowing that they were up to the challenge and high levels of engagement with their job and organization.
Building Resilience When it Matters Most

This webinar has already happened, but you can watch it on demand. Please enter your information below and we’ll email you an access link.

About the presenter:
Dane Jensen is the CEO of Third Factor and an expert on strategy, leadership, and resilience under pressure. Dane oversees Third Factor’s delivery of leadership development programs to leading firms across North America including SAP, TD, RBC, Uber, Twitter, the USGA, and others. He teaches in the Full-Time and Executive MBAs at Queen’s Smith School of Business in Canada and is Affiliate Faculty with UNC Executive Education at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. In addition to his corporate work, Dane works extensively with athletes, coaches, leaders and Boards across Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic sport system to enhance National competitiveness. He has worked as an advisor to Senior Executives in 23 countries on 6 continents, and his first book, tentatively entitled The Power of Pressure, will be published by HarperCollins in early 2021.

In this article:

Three imperatives for L&D during COVID-19

Our Building Resilience program opens by teeing up the ancient curse “may you live in interesting times.” These are interesting times indeed. The COVID-19 outbreak is the third time this century that we have collectively dealt with significant disruption and uncertainty – following the terror attacks on September 11th, and the great recession of 2008-09. The COVID-19 situation is particularly challenging for those of us in learning & development, whose work often centers on bringing groups of people together. Prohibition of non-essential travel and meetings, policies requiring self-isolation before returning to work, and even wide-scale office closures, such as those happening at major U.S. tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter, create significant challenges to ‘business as usual’ when it comes to learning. At the same time – periods of uncertainty and change are precisely the times at which learning is most vital. And, as anyone in adult education knows – relevance is critical to adult learners. When the need is real and present, adult learners are most open to learning new skills. Right now people are in acute need of skills to both handle the pressure they are facing and adjust to new ways of working.
“L&D teams can provide unique value and directly influence how the organization weathers the storm”
Connecting pressure to personal growth is vital for resilience over the long haul. If, as a leader, I feel like the pressure is just a weight on my shoulders that I must endure, it will have a significantly more negative impact than if I see how rising to this challenge can help me become stronger and better. Growth gives meaning to pressure – and our ability to help people see this tough period as a growth experience is a significant imperative for maintaining engagement at work.

Growth gives meaning to pressure.

Taken together, this makes the coming months a time when L&D teams can provide unique value and directly influence how the organization weathers the storm. The coming months will undoubtedly be a period of great pressure – but how heavy that pressure sits, and how skillfully it is navigated, is within L&D’s circle of influence. By rising to meet this challenge, learning and development organizations can support their risk management teams, build esteem for the department among senior executives, show the ability of the department to deliver in critical moments, directly influence performance outcomes, and directly support an entire workforce through an extremely challenging time. So, how can L&D navigate the choppy waters of risk mitigation policies while seizing the moment to step up and shine? We see three major imperatives:

1. Demonstrate agility + resilience – leverage technology to continue “regularly scheduled programing”

Personal growth and development is a major driver of satisfaction and engagement in the workplace. When other drivers of satisfaction and engagement are compromised, continuing to invest in learning is vital. And, as learning organizations – we want to model the behaviours we are asking leaders to engage in: resilience, adaptability and flexibility. If we are asking others in the organization to continue to do their jobs in the face of disruption – it’s up to us to do the same.
“Think deliberately about a learning journey that is designed to sustain energy and support application”
Depending on the measures in place in your organization, this may include continuing to run in-person programming in small-medium sized groups – perhaps modified to focus on local attendees. In many cases, however, policies will necessitate the conversion of regularly scheduled programming into virtual delivery. Speaking from the perspective of an organization focused entirely on the development of leadership, collaboration and resilience skills – there are two imperatives we see to getting this right:

Think Fortnite, not Netflix

There is a reason in-person, instructor-led training continues to deliver the best learning outcomes: it gives people a chance to engage directly with an expert, to learn from peers, and to debate, dialogue and practice. In short, it’s a participative experience. While it is tempting to replace in-person programming with self-paced programs and video libraries – think Netflix – when it comes to executive function skills like coaching, collaboration, and resilience, getting strong learning outcomes requires collaboration. This is the ‘Fortnite’ model: we’re in this together, working alongside each other, in constant communication, and working towards a common goal.

Think Fortnite, not Netflix – virtual learning should be interactive and participative.

Divide and conquer

With dates already reserved on learners’ calendars, it can seem logistically easy to replace a 1-day in-person program with a 1-day virtual session. Even the most expertly designed and facilitated virtual sessions begin to lose their energy, however, after the two-hour mark. Instead, take advantage of the luxury of dividing learning up into more manageable modules. Freed from the requirements of a group of 25-30 learners traveling to one location for a short period of time, virtual sessions give you the opportunity to think deliberately about a learning journey that is designed to sustain energy and support application. The best designs involve modules that don’t require prolonged periods of attention, include interactivity and discussions that invite participation and reduce the temptation of distraction, and close with a clearly actionable outcome that learners can practice prior to the next module (i.e. an action learning-oriented approach). Virtual instructor-led technology has come a long way in even the past 12 months. In the face of COVID-19 we’ve been working directly with many of our clients to use a technology stack focused on interactivity and collaboration to ‘convert’ their in-person experience into virtual ones – complete with breakout rooms, lively discussion, whiteboard sessions and polling. Take advantage of new technology to demonstrate resourcefulness.

2. Build resilience in all corners of your organization

Ultimately, resilience is built in the troughs, not the peaks. And, not only is this a time in which resilience skills are vital – it’s also the perfect time to support your people in building resilience. In my forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Power of Pressure, I argue that the two key factors that ramp up pressure are importance (“this matters to me”) and uncertainty (“I don’t know how this will turn out”). The threat posed by COVID-19 delivers an unhealthy dose of both these ingredients.

Changing policies and sparsely populated offices are just two sources of uncertainty.

In the face of this pressure, learning and development teams have an opportunity to show that the organization cares not just about physical safety but also about people’s psychological wellbeing, and stands ready to help them learn the skills they need to not just survive but thrive through this period. There are two key imperatives here:

Support physical resilience

Employee wellness programs have never been more important than they are right now. Sleep, nutrition and exercise are the basis of not just a healthy immune system but also a resilient individual. Now is the time to promote awareness of the programs available to your teams.

Build inner resilience

Resilience isn’t a genetic gift – it’s a set of skills that can be learned and mastered. Often we assume that resilience will be built naturally as a by-product of tough times – but just like an athlete needs a good coach to reap the developmental benefits of sport, so too do individuals need support in learning how to channel pressure into growth.
“In times of challenge, what’s often most challenging is that the old pressure doesn’t go away”
In our Building Resilience program, we do this by giving participants an understanding of how uncertainty and pressure impact their performance and health, and then grow their awareness of the choices they have and skills they can use to enhance their resilience under pressure. I led a 90-minute virtual session on resilience for leaders at a major cruise line last week. As you can imagine, the pressure they are facing is immense. In our opening exercise, I asked them to identify the things that make this “interesting times” for them. Here is a random sample of the 46 responses I received: What’s most interesting to me is that the responses weren’t simply “coronavirus” 46 times. In times of challenge, what’s often most challenging is that the old pressure doesn’t go away – we simply add more to the pile, further compounding our already high-pressure lives. In acute scenarios such as this one, people need to have a clear sense of: These choices apply to your learning organization as well. Most consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak are outside of your control. Policies will be handed down from senior executives. Despite best efforts, people may become ill. There may be disruption to supply chains, operations, and other critical components of your business. Having the discernment to identify the things outside of your control and the ability to let those things go is a critical aspect to resilience. A leader who can paint a clear picture of where we are going to focus our attention and what we are going to ignore is invaluable in any crisis. How you prepare your workforce for this challenge, however, is within your control. Investing in resilience skills for your organization is an easy way to demonstrate empathy and support, improve performance and productivity, and arm your workforce with the skills to rise to the occasion. The coming few months may not be enjoyable, but with the right tools everyone can emerge with the satisfaction of knowing that they were up to the challenge. This will greatly increase engagement with their own jobs as well as appreciation for an organization that cared enough to address the situation in a proactive, skill building manner.

With the right tools, everyone can emerge knowing they were up to the challenge.

3. Give People the 1:1 Learning They Crave (Without Breaking the Bank)

“The next few months provide a real opportunity for learning organizations to invest in the 1:1 learning that people crave”
All of the research into learning tells us that providing individualized, coaching is among the best ways to help people learn, achieve their goals, and feel satisfied with their progress. And yet, the cost of providing individualized coaching is often prohibitive at scale. The next few months provide a real opportunity for learning organizations to invest in the 1:1 learning that people crave. The travel challenges posed by the COVID-19 threat will mean a dramatic reduction in travel expenses, and 1:1 coaching is uniquely suited to virtual delivery. Taken together, this provides an opportunity to invest in personalized coaching for your high potential talent at a cost that’s similar to what you would spend on a per-person basis to bring people together for a workshop. Depending on how your organization calculates the overall cost-benefit of leadership development, reduced time away from the field for participants can also support your case for making this kind of investment. So, how do you do this effectively? Two ideas:

1 goal, 3 months

Unlike traditional executive coaching, which is often an open-ended partnership between a coachee and a coach, have people pick a meaningful goal in conjunction with their coach and give them 3 months of support to move towards it. Framing coaching around time-bounded outcomes makes for more deliberate, action-oriented partnerships, gives you a measuring stick for demonstrating ROI to the organization, and ensures that you don’t add on-going cost into your budget.

Build self-awareness + self-responsibility

As we all know, adults don’t change because a coach tells them to. They do it because they develop the self-responsibility to change. In our experience, the best way to build self-responsibility in a short period of time is to kick off a coaching partnership with a strong self-assessment tool. We use a tool called The Interpersonal and Attentional Styles Inventory (TAIS) that lends itself perfectly to this kind of individualized development. The TAIS was originally developed for Olympic athletes to better understand their tendencies under pressure and make conscious strategic decisions about how to play to their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. It was then adopted by the US Navy SEALS for the same purpose and is now very highly regarded in the business community as a tool for building self-awareness and high performance in the corporate environment. The TAIS looks at 18 different metrics to help people understand how they are most likely to behave under pressure and how their unique traits compare to their teammates and contemporaries. As an example, the TAIS results may show that someone has high needs for control – that is, they are less comfortable with uncertainty and like to have a clear view of what’s coming. In the current climate, this tendency has the potential to create significant additional strain for both the individual and anyone they lead as they attempt to exert control in a situation that is largely impossible to influence. Working with a TAIS coach in a one-on-one coaching call, the employee can gain a better understanding of how that tendency is likely to manifest and develop strategies for mitigating its impact. By combining the online TAIS assessment with one-on-one video coaching, you can create an opportunity for your high performing talent to gain a better understanding of themselves, adapt more readily to changes in their environment, and actually enhance their learning through the downturn rather than merely mitigate the impact.

Team Canada Captain Hayley Wickenheiser shares her TAIS experience.

Want to Learn More?

Your opportunity to make an important contribution to your organization over the coming months is a brief one and you will need to move quickly to succeed. We are committed to supporting you in seizing this moment and readying the workforce for a period of disruption. If you want to get started right away, we have two turn-key ways for you to roll out 1:1 virtual coaching, and resilience skill-building. For your executive team, mid-senior leadership and high-potential employees, we offer TAIS self-assessments and coaching calls that can be scaled for teams of all sizes and begin delivering to participants in a matter of days. For teams and business units that are most affected by your organization’s COVID-19 response, we are offering an adapted version of our Building Resilience program, delivered entirely online and available in a modular format comprising 1 to 5 modules. Give us a shout if you’d like to know more. For further reading on some of the subjects discussed here, we have a few whitepapers that are especially relevant. And finally, if you have any questions or want to speak with us directly about your organization’s learning and development needs in the face of COVID-19, we are here to help. You can reach us at any time at mail@thirdfactor.com. This Friday marks the 10-year anniversary of the Closing Ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. Here at Third Factor, we were incredibly proud to directly and indirectly support many of the athletes and coaches that would go on to become household names. Ten years later, we are still committed to supporting Olympic and Paralympic athletes and coaches in their bid for the podium. And three incredible stories from the 2010 Games continue to influence our understanding of the power of pressure and the way we interact with our clients across all areas of our business.

Changing a Canadian mindset

Prior to the Vancouver Olympics, Canada was known in Olympic circles for one notable achievement: it was the only nation in the world to host the Games without a local athlete winning gold. In fact, Canada had achieved this feat twice; first at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, and again at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. When Vancouver won the bid to host the 2010 Winter Games, Canada’s 13 winter national sport organizations were determined to change that reputation. A report by sport management consultant and Olympic Hall of Famer, Cathy Priestner Allinger, found that Canadian athletes ranked top-five in the world the year before the games were far less likely to go on to win an Olympic medal than international athletes who were performing at the same level.
“Canada’s challenge wasn’t producing world-class athletes; it was producing world-class athletes who could perform with all the distractions and pressure of the Olympics”
In other words, Canada’s challenge wasn’t producing world-class athletes; it was producing world-class athletes who could perform with all the distractions and pressure of the Olympics. Brian Orser was one of Canada’s star athletes at the Calgary Games in 1988, and he spoke to us about the pressure of competing in front of a home crowd.
To help Canada’s performers prepare for the pressure of Olympic competition, the not-for-profit organization Own the Podium was formed to provide and fund support structures designed to give Canadian athletes the preparation that would allow them to access their best performances in the face of Olympic pressure. Own The Podium was a spectacular success. At Vancouver, Canadian athletes won 26 medals, including a record-setting 14 gold medals, placing Canada third overall. Since that time, Canadian athletes have been ‘converting’ at a rate of around 70% and Canadians now enter Olympic Games with an expectation that they could indeed, be the best in the world.

The impact of self-awareness and communication strategies

We had always believed that self-awareness was a critical component of team performance, and there was no doubt on the subject following our work with the Canadian Women’s Olympic Hockey Team at the Vancouver Games. In 2010, the team was looking to defend its gold medal from the Turin Games four years prior. They were also preparing to face their American arch-rivals who had bested them at the world championship the year before. As the team’s mental performance coach, Third Factor Founder, Dr. Peter Jensen, was tasked with helping the team perform through the high-stakes tournament while under intense scrutiny from the home crowd. To help keep the team running like a finely tuned engine, he elected to bring in our collaboration guru, Peggy Baumgartner, to guide the team through our Self-Aware Team process. Through the program, the team was able to gain a better understanding of their tendencies – both individually and as a team under pressure. And, they leveraged that new understanding to design systems to keep communication flowing effectively when the pressure mounted. The players remember it as a challenge that was both extremely difficult, and extremely worthwhile.
With a strategy in place, the team was able to communicate and stay consistent whether things were going well or poorly. They were able to work their way through the ups and downs of Olympic competition and successfully defend their gold medal on home ice. What we learned is that when you have a high functioning team – even one that’s among the best in the world – one of the most powerful ways to further enhance their performance is to increase their self-awareness and communication skills.

The convergence of health and performance

For us at Third Factor, there was a hidden storyline we were following that was far more significant than the Olympics. One week prior to the start of the Games, Peter Jensen was with the Women’s Olympic Hockey Team in Jasper, Alberta, at their pre-Olympic camp when he received confirmation that he had throat and neck cancer.
“Peter had to keep the information from the team so as not to become an enormous distraction”
Peter had to notify the leadership at Hockey Canada and, with their blessing, continued to support the mental performance of the Women’s Olympic Hockey Team. As they headed into their most important competition of the four-year cycle, Peter had to keep the information from the team so as not to become an enormous distraction while simultaneously teaching skills, being at his best and dispensing regular doses of his usual sense of humour. Peter is currently cancer-free and maintains a crazy busy schedule delivering keynote speeches to audiences big and small around the world. Peter wrote about his experience in his own words in his whitepaper, When Health and Performance Converge: What I (re)Learned From Cancer. It’s a great read if you’re curious to learn more about how he was able to stay resilient through such a difficult time. To those of us at Third Factor, the 2010 Vancouver Games are a reminder that Peter doesn’t just teach people how to handle pressure, he lives and breathes the content. If you will be at the upcoming HRPA Conference in Toronto, be sure to join me for two talks I’ll be giving: The Meta-Skilled Organization: Building the Capacity to Evolve, and Future-Proofing Your Organization. Watch the video below for more information or keep reading for a text version.

Sunrise Keynote | The Meta-Skilled Organization: Building the Capacity to Evolve

Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 – 7:15AM – Room 718A – Session #202

This is a sunrise keynote, and the topic of the day is going to be evolution. In a world where job requirements are changing, new skills are emerging, old skills need to be discarded, there has never been a time where evolution and adaptability is more important. It’s not that helpful to just tell people, “hey, you need to get better at evolving.” We need to help them understand how. I’ll unpack it the capability of evolution and have, what I hope, is a really interesting discussion on the role of self-awareness, flexibility, creativity, resilience, and a couple other key ingredients that go into personal evolution. See more about this keynote at the HRPA Conference website.

Breakout Session | Future-Proofing Your Organization

Friday, January 24th, 2020 – 9:45AM – Room 711 – Session #306

In this breakout session, I’ll have an opportunity to unpack resilience, which is a key part of the journey of evolution. Resilience is one of my favorite topics, and for my money, there has never been a time where resilience has been more important. We are dealing with change. We are dealing with setbacks. We need individuals, teams, and organizations that can cultivate the ability to navigate change with resilience and adaptability. And there are a lot of questions around resilience: Is it something that you’re born with? Is it something that we can build? How does resilience differ across individuals and teams? I’ll unpack what we’ve learned from our work in sport and business, and hopefully answer a couple of those questions, while starting a bit of a dialog on this really important topic. See more about this keynote at the HRPA Conference website. In 2002, the Canadian Women’s National Hockey Team entered the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in an unfamiliar position: as underdogs. They had not hit their stride as a team, their confidence had taken a hit, and emotions were at risk of boiling over. In eight head-to-head games against the Americans leading up to the Olympics, Canada had lost all eight. For many players, it was hard to avoid memories from four years earlier when the team had lost to the Americans in the gold medal game. Jayna Hefford, who was playing in the first Games of her Hall of Fame career, recalls the point when the stress and emotion came to a head: “There was an intense conversation in the dressing room with the team. A lot of people had a lot to say about things we needed to do and how we were going to get better, and we realized that a lot of what was happening was the blame game.”
“We realized that a lot of what was happening was the blame game.”
Through a frank, players-only discussion the team was able to come together, but the conversation could have gone a number of different ways. It stayed on track because the team was prepared – mentally and emotionally – to have performance conversations under pressure and surface a number of issues the team needed to resolve. And that preparation turned out to be an important stepping stone to winning gold in Salt Lake City.

Training the bomb squad

Handled poorly, team communication under pressure can lead to combustion. And just like you wouldn’t get success as a bomb disposal technician going in without their toolkit, you won’t find success in communicating through tense situations if your team isn’t prepared. The advantage the women’s team had that allowed them to emerge from that conversation united was a deep awareness of their communication tendencies and systems to counteract the counterproductive ones. They had laid the foundation for performance conversations in good times so that they could happen and be productive when the difficulty hit. In other words: they had a tool kit and they knew how to use it.
“The biggest opportunity for meaningful growth is often to increase self-awareness and strengthen their ability to communicate productively when under pressure.”
We’ve worked with hundreds of teams in elite sport and business, including the last four medal-winning Canadian women’s hockey teams. One of the things we’ve learned is that when teams are already operating at a high level, the biggest opportunity for meaningful growth is often to increase their self-awareness and strengthen their ability to communicate productively when under pressure. To support this, we’ve developed a process to help teams become more aware of their tendencies, develop systems and practice performance conversations anytime. At the heart of this process is a tool called the TAIS – The Attentional and Interpersonal Styles inventory. The TAIS was developed for use by Navy SEALs and Olympic athletes, and we’ve found it to be an incredibly valuable tool for diagnosing communication challenges on all kinds of teams. When the pressure is on, when teams are in the midst of setbacks and failure, individuals will fall back on their default communication styles.

Five communication choices

The author of the TAIS, Dr. Robert Nidefer, showed that people make five choices over and over in the course of a conversation. These choices are informed by their tendencies on five dimensions.
Give up/take control – are you more likely to try to take control, or cede control to someone else? Speed up/slow down – are you more likely to force action or a decision, or encourage more thought and consideration? Extroverted/introverted – are you going to seek out others, or try to solve the problem yourself? Become quiet/express thoughts – are you going to become quiet and try to understand, or advocate for your position? Critique/express support – will you say no and become more critical, or will you say yes and express support?

Cut the right wire

Every team will have members with different tendencies. Ultimately, it’s not the tendencies that matter; it’s the level of awareness team members have of their tendencies, and the systems they put in place to leverage their strengths and weaknesses in the heat of the moment. The highest performing teams we work with take three critical steps in preparing for productive communication under any circumstances.

Acknowledge the “I” in team

Great coaches know that the phrase “there is no I in team” is a myth. Every individual makes their own contribution – and without self-awareness, people can’t adjust. That’s why the first step in your team’s communication action plan is to encourage every individual to build self-awareness across these five choices. By knowing and understanding their default tendencies, team members can begin to recognize their behaviour and course-correct when necessary for the good of the team.

Connect to the “we” of the team

It’s advantageous to know your individual tendencies, and the value is multiplied when that information is shared with everyone on the team. When you raise the waterline of team awareness, everyone can work on the same communication system. Team members can see the intent behind the behaviors their teammates exhibit. The process can be incredibly difficult; Team Canada Captain Hayley Wickenheiser called sharing her profile with her team-mates, “the most stressful part of the 4-year [Olympic] quadrennial.”

Come together as a team

Armed with knowledge of self and others, teams can come together and translate self-awareness into action. When pressure hits, if everybody on the team has the tendency to get louder, express their thoughts and try to take control of the conversation, the team can make decisions in advance to decide who’s going to take control when issues arise. By having these conversations earlier, teams can build systems to fall back on when the pressure is turned up.

Preventing detonation

The next time you’re headed into a potentially high stakes conversations, use the five choices below to carry out a short 3-step preparation exercise:

1. Plot your default tendency on each of the five scales – given your past history, where are you most likely to fall?

2. Where would you ideally like to be as you head into this specific interaction?

3. What are the gaps between your ideal and default style? What actions will you take to ensure you are at your ideal?

Repurpose the fuel for growth

We’ve said before that negative emotion is volatile fuel. Improperly handled, it can lead to combustion. Used properly, it can lead to high performance. Team communication must go beyond just staying cool during difficult times. Teams must use communication to understand and lean in to their negative emotions, uncover what the emotions are telling them, and frame it as an opportunity for growth. This is what happened with the women’s team in 2002. They prepared to have productive communication at all times, and used the tools they learned to find the opportunity for growth at a moment when it could have blown up. Jayna Hefford explains:
By understanding your individual communication style, sharing your tendencies with the team and proactively planning to address potential faults, your team can find its way through difficult times and not just safely diffuse difficult situations but find new strength and opportunity for higher performance in the process. When the trajectory of your life hangs in the balance of one critical moment – when your heart is racing, your palms are sweaty, and your breathing is ragged – how do you nail it? Few people are better qualified to answer this question than Olympic skating legends Brian Orser and Tracy Wilson. As athletes, they carried the weight of a nation at the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary – entering as a reigning world champion and 7-time Canadian champion, respectively. Competing in front of a home crowd with incredibly high expectations, Brian and Tracy won 2 of Canada’s 5 medals in Calgary. Today, Brian and Tracy are coaches to a new generation of elite skaters from around the world at the Toronto Cricket Club. They’ve produced gold medalists for the last 3 Olympic games and currently coach the reigning Olympic men’s champion, Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, and the reigning Olympic women’s silver medalist, Evgenia Medvedeva of Russia. As athletes and coaches, Brian and Tracy have delivered exceptional performances in moments of intense pressure. In this video series, they shine some light on their experience performing under pressure and coaching athletes to perform under pressure, and reveal simple strategies you can use to be at your best in your own most critical moments.

“There was a media frenzy”

Brian Orser describes the media frenzy and inescapable layers of pressure he felt leading up to the ‘Battle of the Brians’ on home ice at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.

 “What got me so excited was representing Canada”

Tracy Wilson shares how she practiced the emotional moments in advance of competition at the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary.

“We were prepared for any scenario”

Brian Orser talks about how he established and practiced routines for any situation, whether he had to skate first or wait around to skate 6th.

 “I hate this part”

Tracy Wilson explains how leaning into emotions can help performers diffuse tension and how coaches can use communication to help their team members perform at critical moments.