Episode 298: Organizational Effectiveness – An Essential Component of Any Performance Journey
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Talent, ambition, and a strong work ethic are crucial for achieving high performance in any field. Following a program and adopting daily practices and habits that promote readiness and teach lessons to develop necessary skills is also essential. However, none of these elements alone can lead to optimal results.
Organizational effectiveness, which includes planning and structure, brings all these elements together and is the key to high performance in any field.
In this week's episode of the Purple Patch Podcast, Ironman Master Coach Matt Dixon talks about organizational effectiveness and how it can help you optimize your talent, intelligence, and effort to achieve your goals.
Matt emphasizes its significance and reflects on how he transformed organizational effectiveness into a vital tool that he now employs for all Purple Patch athletes and the entire Purple Patch team. He explains the importance of creating a framework to help organize, prioritize, eliminate distractions, and ultimately provide control for making informed decisions and achieving all objectives in life and sport.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 04:04 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
04:19 - 09:59 - Word of the Week
10:06 - 26:25 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 298: Organizational Effectiveness – An Essential Component of Any Performance Journey
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:00
I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 00:24
I think you look terrific, at least on the outside. But what's going on on the outside is not really what drives your performance. No matter what arena you're chasing, better improvements in life, it's really important about what's going on inside. It's very difficult to understand what's going on with your physiology, especially across all of the aspects that drive our performance. Well, a tool that we leverage at Purple Patch is InsideTracker. By assessing your biometrics and combining it with the advice and expertise from the team of scientists and experts at InsideTracker, we get some really precise focus areas to filter out the stuff that will become distractions, and instead dial in the habits and the interventions that are going to help you perform across all aspects of longevity and performance. Things like your cognitive health, your strengths, inflammation, heart health, and everything that builds up to you becoming a high-performing machine. InsideTracker assesses it and gives you an action plan with simple actions that you can take so that you can go on and improve. And it's very, very simple. All you need to do is head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch and use this special code Purple Patch Pro 20, that's Purple Patch Pro two zero, it gives you 20% off everything at the store. I leverage it with my athletes, and you can too. You don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete. But what you do need to care about is improvement throughout 2024. And that's what we're here to help you with. All right, enjoy the show.
Matt Dixon 02:07
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. As ever, your host, Matt Dixon, and today we're going to talk about something sexy, organizational effectiveness. Goodness me, are you salivating? Well, it turns out, this is a key component of anyone's performance journey. For the last 20 years, I've worked with successful elite athletes and high achievers in business, and everyone I worked with was talented, to some degree, they were certainly ambitious. They all understood the importance and commitment of hard work. And for success, every single person I work with buys into the program. The main components of the program - adopting the practices and habits that facilitate performance readiness every day, and then secondly, in the other channel, really developing and embracing the journey. Because they understand and appreciate the journey of commitment, they're gonna derive loads of lessons that are going to make up the critical tools to equip them for their journey towards success. And this is great. But there's a truth to all of this, that none of this would lead to optimal results, whether it's in sport or business if it weren't for their organizational effectiveness. The framework, the planning, and the organization, that is the catalyst to make it all work. And so today, what I thought we would do is dig into the details a little bit, and provide a little bit of perspective around this. And so the thing for you to perform isn't just your smarts or talent, your hard work, but it is ensuring that it's effective. The good news is that it's not overcomplicated. And so it's gonna be pretty short and sweet today, but it will be of high value in use. Before we get going though. Let's sit back and relax. It's time to do Barry, the Word of the Week. Sing away.
Matt Dixon 04:19
Yes, folks, the word of the week this week. Well, it's one of my performance words - Team. Last week, I was being interviewed by someone from the media and they asked me a very interesting question that took me aback actually a little bit because they said, Okay, working with you, How's that different than working with some other coach? And that almost pushed me into the corner had to be egotistical with my answer. And so I wanted to share my response with you today because I thought it provided a little bit of an opportunity into the perspective and approach that we apply at Purple Patch and I thought it might be interesting for you on your journey. So my line back to the interviewer was pretty short and sweet. I said, Well, I think the biggest difference is whenever I work with an athlete, they don't just work with me. And of course that flummoxed the interviewer, and they requested that I say more. And so allow me to paint the context a little bit. When some people take on a coach, they go through a process, typically - which coach is going to fit my goals, my personality, my situation, what I'm looking to achieve? And there's nothing wrong with this. But if we just pause for a couple of seconds, and think about other sports, particularly at the elite level, it's seldom that any individual athlete is ever going to be solely dependent on a single person's expertise and wisdom to further their performance. Typically, there's some form of a team around that athlete. And so I asked the question, why would you limit yourself to a single person's expertise no matter who they are, when you can benefit from the expertise of many? And this is the very mindset that we took when we set up our Purple Patch ecosystem. You see in our squad programs, using one example, any athlete who participates in that program enjoys the benefit of not a single person or guide, but the whole Purple Patch team. And in addition, they have access to a host of experts in fields that we provide access to along the way. And even if it's an athlete that's working directly with me, one to one, I can't think of a single athlete that I've coached along the journey, who, throughout their progression hasn't benefited from the expertise of someone in the broader Purple Patch ecosystem.
Matt Dixon 06:50
Now, this might be a video assessment around swimming from Coach John Stevens, or it might be a strength session with Marcia at the Performance Center, or maybe a little individualized help on hydration from Andy Blow of Precision Hydration, or feeling and nutrition guidance from Scott Tindal at Fuel In. Whatever it is, there are lots of people in the tool shed, if you want to call it that, to help any individual be successful. The key is while I'm effectively owning the program, I'm responsible for the guidance, the prescription, the education, etc. Why would I not as a coach, draw on the expertise from others to help this athlete be successful? After all, let's face facts here, John Stevens, Purple Patch coach, is better than me at developing technical swim improvements. He's a really good technician. And Marcia is a true wizard in functional strength. Andy and Scott, who I mentioned, are considered world experts in our fields. And so by me opening up, and sometimes understanding when it's important to take a step back, everybody wins because most importantly, the athlete wins. And for me, the reason I highlight this today is because this is much of what it means to be a Purple Patch athlete. It's also why we put so much energy into how we operate as a coaching team. We collaborate, we coordinate, as a team and a set of experts. What does it take to make athletes faster? What does it take to help them integrate practices into their life to make their big life bigger? That's the question. It's not - Oh look at me, look how good I can make them. How can we do this? This is why as a coaching team, we've been together for quite some years now. Not many coaches leave Purple Patch. In addition, it is quite an arduous journey for any incoming coach to go through the process to learn and enable us to have the trust to integrate them where we set them free on an individual athlete because being a Purple Patch coach means thinking about things in Team, going beyond yourself, and to be a Purple Patch athlete, to be willing and open, to ensure that you're surrounding yourself by experts to make yourself better. We have a fun saying at Purple Patch. I don't ask for much, just everything. Now, of course, that's a unifying comment. It also brings a little bit of a chuckle, but it's something that we take seriously. What does it take to make athletes more successful? And we're gonna bring everything. All we ask is you bring your very best. So why don't we do that? And that is why our Word of the Week this week is Team. And with that, well, I'm hungry ladies and gentlemen, let's get on with it. It is time for the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 10:06
Yes, folks, the meat and potatoes. Organizational Effectiveness. It's not exactly the most sexy subject, I agree. But it is a golden key. It is a golden key that you can leverage to unlock whatever talent or smarts you have, the hard work that you're willing to put in, throughout the journey. It is the gasoline on your performance fire. And yet most people don't consider it or think about it. And so to highlight why this is important, what I thought we'd do is we'd go back to how we developed our tool for organizational effectiveness that is now leveraged across every Purple Patch athlete, as well as all of the Purple Patch team, all the employees, all of the coaches, myself, Kelli, we all leverage what is called the Sunday Special. But we need to understand where it all came from. Because it was a fix to solve what I saw as a very big challenge early on in my coaching career on the Purple Patch pro squad.
Matt Dixon 11:18
I realized something important over the first two years, each of these athletes was very talented, ambitious, and hardworking, but consistently, they faced struggles with organizational effectiveness. Now, you might not have stopped to consider this but the life of a professional athlete goes way beyond the demands of just swim, bike and run in a triathlete's case. It goes well beyond sport. And almost every single week, I had athletes who faced roadblocks from really, ultimately the truth is, poor planning and prioritization. I became aware that many of the teams that I was coaching were existing. What I mean by that is they were just living their life deep in the weeds. They were checking off the boxes of sessions, but never hitting the sessions as understanding the context, what was occurring in the days following, and how they needed to execute it to make the whole program work together. They were just day-to-day, session to session, checking them off, working hard, but not necessarily working effectively. In other words, as I looked at almost all the athletes that I was working with in the early years, they existed in a highly reactive state. And as a consequence, not a week went by where I didn't get a complaint, or report - I missed a session. I didn't fuel properly after the workout, I just didn't have anything in the cupboard. I'm just feeling overwhelmed. The training is fatiguing.
Matt Dixon 12:54
Now to add to this. I was frustrated as a coach as well. How can these athletes who are so talented, lack even the basic understanding to be able to make smart decisions when they're met with fatigue? Should I push through, or should I maybe back off and save it for another day? And if they came across a training session, in which I asked them to go easy and smooth, it was 50/50 whether they would follow that prescription, or go hard, often sabotaging a subsequent key workout. And so I was frustrated as a coach at the athletes, they were frustrated because they didn't have any sense of control. Now, this was interesting. Because I, as a coach had their trust, they believed in their program. And they all showed up. They were willing. And so this wasn't a lack of an athlete and coach connection. It was a planning and disorganization challenge. I'll never forget sitting at dinner one night, sitting down with Kelli, and just spilling my frustration and annoyance. And I said, Gosh darn it, I need to coach the pros, like CEOs. But equally, I need to coach the CEOs like the pros. Now this saying became a mantra for years at Purple Patch. And there was truth in it. And the reason that I said this was that so many of the professional athletes, were disorganized. They didn't have the same sort of organizational effectiveness that most of the C-level executives that I was working with in parallel did. On the flip side, most of those executives who were highly organized in life did a really poor job of applying any of the smarts and intelligence to their fitness and wellness program. And so we thought, You know what, we need to fix this. This is an opportunity for us to help both the time-starved people who were busy in their professional lives, and those pros who were ultimately seeking world-class performance, and it was my role, to equip them on their journey to be effective in that.
Matt Dixon 15:15
Now, as I said, we had no limitations around trust, commitment, and ambition, we just needed to unlock their effectiveness. So what I decided to do was go on a journey where I could help these pros get organized. But I knew that I needed to make it simple to execute, I needed to make it habitual, I needed to make it universal, across the whole teams, everyone was doing the same thing, and I needed to ensure that it didn't consume much of their life. Because I knew that it wasn't going to be successful if I asked for something every single day, or for a three-hour block on the weekend, they just didn't have the time, the energy, or frankly, the commitment to this part of their journey to do something like that.
Matt Dixon 16:04
So I decided to do some homework. And I didn't look in the sports world. I didn't go back to my world of clinical physiology. Instead, I went to business books and websites. And I reviewed what I felt like the vast majority of available programs and tools out there, all anchored under this banner of organizational effectiveness. Where were you when I needed you Marie Kondo. Anyway, I also went and looked at some of the research out there, and the impact of integrating these tools, planning, and high organization into people's effectiveness, studying the habits and practices of people that I viewed across this business world that were ultimately really effective. And my mission was to try and find a solution that I could apply across every individual, but also the whole team. The focus was a few key elements straightforward.
Matt Dixon 16:54
Number one, a framework, a framework coordinates all of the competing demands they had. So think about it, training, nutrition, recovery, sleep, managing sponsors, developing brand, all of those components, a tool that could coordinate all of those in any given week. That was number one. Number two, I wanted to utilize a system or tool that could help with perspective. And so a little bit of a prioritization exercise, because there are always 50 things that you can focus on, I want the athlete to be empowered to understand, okay, this week coming, not only what are the key training sessions that I've got coming up, but across everything I could focus on, I kind of need to, what are the things that I am going to focus on. And so becoming what I call an assassin of effectiveness, and be quite savage on actually being able to say, this is what I'm deliberately intentionally not going to focus on this week so that I can show up X, Y, and Z. Perfect. The third element was to deliver on a goal of adopting a practice that would help the athlete have clarity, and focus - okay, great. I've got these two days where I need to show up and train well, they're going to be the challenging ones, etc. And ultimately, establish a sense of control. That's the magic word - Stability, Control. And so in other words, I wanted every athlete to enter each week. And that was always Monday for us, in a ready-to-execute mode, instead of the current highly reactive state that many of them did.
Matt Dixon 18:36
Now, I realized that no single solution was probably going to emerge out of this, but I also realized something else. And that's that no matter how good our planning was, no matter how well we set up a system, life is not a spreadsheet, things change. So instead, what I wanted to do is give a runway an athlete to develop that control that focuses on prioritization, but also have their eyes wide open to the week so that when stuff did happen, and invariably it did, they are at least better equipped to make smart real-time decisions. That was important. Now, out of all the research we did, and we went back and forth, we didn't come up with a single off-the-shelf approach. And that's not surprising, because we were trying to get a lot of things done. But what I did get to do was draw and get inspired from many of them, and then just tailor and tinker with it to create something that would work for us. And what emerged was a program and a system that while it has evolved a little bit, and we've tinkered with it and changed it a little bit along the way, it has stood the test of time, because this was about 15 years ago. But still, now this tool is the backbone and practice not just for elite athletes throughout that decade, plus of working with the Purple Patch pro squad, but it is the same organizational framework that we use for anyone engaged with Purple Patch - our coaching team and all of our employees, myself and Kelli, the executives we work with, the busy parents, time-starved athletes and beyond. It is called the Sunday Special.
Matt Dixon 20:21
It's straightforward. The reason we call it the Sunday Special is because most typically, people adopt it and execute this practice on a Sunday before they enter the week. And here's the headline news - It doesn't take long. It is a commitment it's a habit of 30 minutes in a nice comfortable chair, maybe with a nice espresso, or maybe even off-new brandy if you so wish, a nice pen, it doesn't need to be feather quilled. But a nice pen in which you're going to commit to 30 minutes, and you're going to go through a few simple steps. The biggest thing is to get first clarity, then go forth and get focus and prioritization, including filtering out distractions. And we tend to start with the life stuff. Think about if you've got kids and such forth, family and life commitments. Okay, what are the building blocks here? What do we need to get done? Where are the priorities? Where do I need to be when boom? The second step is looking at work. Fantastic. Okay, what are my big meetings, what are the priorities? What am I going to focus on and achieve this week? And perhaps most importantly, or as importantly, what am I not going to do? What can I push back to the weeks following, so that I can build a system of focus and success over at any given week? And then the third step is going to integrate, there's the magic word training and all of the other habits in life. Now, there's more to it than this. But that's just the headline, news of the process - life, work, training, and habits, and you're getting all of the competing demands to work together.
Matt Dixon 22:07
Now, when I designed this, I was designing it for the pro athletes. And I was thinking in pretty small terms, I wanted a planning tool for the week ahead. But what quickly emerged was, ah, what this is doing is forcing, by adopting this habit, a key component of a high-performance mindset. All of those traits that we know, highly successful people develop and adopt, and one of them is reflection. And the Sunday special, or whatever planning tool you use on any given week, is a wonderful opportunity to have forced reflection. Because by that 30-minute commitment, you're pausing, you're coming out of the weeds of life, you're looking back, and hopefully you're going, How was last week? What did I do well? What did I achieve? What are the areas that I can improve on? And then also, as you plan the next week - Where do I need to course correct? I know where I'm looking to go, this is my North Star or my mission, I'm going to course correct, and then under that context, I'm going to go through my planning. And that becomes powerful. And so it's no surprise that this tool that was designed to develop with professional athletes in mind, just to manage all their competing demands, naturally flows and extends well beyond elite athletics, because it's a really simple, easy-to-adopt practice for effectiveness.
Matt Dixon 23:38
And, in our educational program, the Purple Patch method, when we take an incoming athlete and help them become more effective, the first thing they do is - not to get them moving every day, not to adopt practices of nutrition or recovery. We don't get them to get a gym membership for strength. Instead, what we get them to focus on is the Sunday Special, because it is the framework that everything else is going to operate within. And so what's the lesson for today? Well, as you march forward, you head into the year ahead. I highly recommend that whatever practice works for you. It doesn't have to have the cute name as the Sunday Special. But whatever practice works for you to plan your week - organize, prioritize, filter out distractions. Don't just make it something that you might do, make it a non-negotiable, because every week it should provide control, and perspective and enable you as life happens to make really smart in-time decisions. From this platform, your ambition, and your hard work, can flourish, and you can meet your performance potential. I'll see you next week.
Matt Dixon 24:53
Guys, thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel on YouTube, and you will find it there and you can subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you, if you will subscribe also share it with your friends. And it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. Now any questions you have, let me know, feel free to add a comment and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@PurplePatchFitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show on the Purple Patch page and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset as we like to call it. And so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're trying hard to make it a special experience and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
athlete, work, week, purple, patch, coach, performance, organizational effectiveness, tool, focus, habits, journey, kelli, program, practice, adopt, team, commitment, competing demands, planning