Appreciating the quiet aura of success

I spent yesterday morning in the company of the great and the good who link technology education and the workforce environment as part of one of Adecco's 'Unlocking Britain's Potential' round table events. One guy stood out: not for his loud voice or strident opinions; not for the force of his rhetoric or, indeed, any startling originality of contribution. 

That guy was Mark Richardson, a British Olympian who won Silver on the track in Atlanta in 1996. He's a slight guy; not very tall but with a fierce intensity and sense of focus that I've only ever seen in people who have been at the top in their sport. I used to work with a guy called Jon Potter, another Olympian who won a hockey Gold medal. Yesterday I recognised that same sense of calm authority and absolute belief. Each is someone who has benefited from superb coaching in their sporting career and has turned that same approach back into their business life. It's an approach we still use too rarely in the time-pressured atmosphere of the workplace today.

Listening to Mark made me recall the absolute high I felt at age 16 when I broke 54 seconds for the 400m in an early summer school athletics meeting. My time, in benign conditions when I'd been towed round the track by a faster runner (and probably benefited from hand-timing) was almost two seconds under my personal best. I didn't even win the race but it was one of the best feelings I've ever experienced, and briefly, for a few seconds, I felt I could really achieve something in sport. Athletics had been my main focus, but rapidly gave way to O Levels. By the next summer, I had a Saturday job and a girlfriend and the track didn't have anything like the same allure.

Guys like Mark Richardson followed their passion, pushing all other distractions to the side to be the very best. I've no doubt I could and would have shaved a few more seconds off my PB (which would have put me 100m behind the winner at Atlanta!) but I never had the natural talent nor the strength of focus to be more than a decent club athlete. Nor did I have that coaching environment around me to help me to excel.

In business, the best organisations I work with have that ability to bring on excellence; to encourage, to motivate and to celebrate when we get things right. We need a few more Jon Potters and Mark Richardsons in business - more personality, empathy and understanding of that un-bottleable feeling that success delivers.

You make your choice and take the consequences

I'm a tad gutted that I've had to turn down Sean Trainor's offer to speak in one of the CIPR Inside's Engage Inside Expo sessions in London on May 5. It would have been a chance to share the research I worked on at the tail end of last year - and look forward to how it may move on this year.

But, the way I choose to operate my business has meant I've had to give up the opportunity to share a platform with the MacLeod 2 team and other practitioners with some skin in the engagement game. While the Expo will be in full swing, I'll be a dozen miles west in Uxbridge on day two of my university's annual research student event. It's just about the only compulsory event for researchers all year, but if I'm not there (and I missed it last year while stuck under a volcanic ash cloud), my chances of advancing to my next year of PhD research will be slimmer than a pre-pregnancy Victoria Beckham.

Back in 2007, I took the conscious decision to ease back on work and complete an MA in International Relations. It meant about a day and a half a week onsite at University from late September - April - with a frantic drive to over-index on work from late April to early September. The MA went really well and by 2010 had segued into PhD research (NOT part of the plan in 2007). That was easy to fit in when times were tough and I wasn't picking up work. However, the past year has been a less easy balance.

Long-term (post PhD) I plan to do more in academic research and, if there's any left by then, academic teaching. To that end, I've been balancing up comms work with part-time lecturing and support for some of the full-time staff (essay marking, running seminars etc). At times there's a really interesting synergy between the academic work and the organisational comms stuff but at other times there are some tectonic crashes as my two worlds collide. The Expo is one of those occasions.

Still, last week I had the pleasure of sharing a roundtable event with MacLeod 2's Nita Clark (of course it should  be Clark/MacLeod ) during the kick-off phase of Adecco's 'Unlocking Britain's Potential' .  The theme of this first roundtable was engagement - and while there was probably still too much time spent attempting to define what engagement is, there was consensus that no successful organisation can afford either to ignore it or to place it in a 'task' box. I'm going to be working with Adecco and the research team Loudhouse on the research outcomes/plan of action report later in the year. Perhaps it's another tip in the balance from organisational comms consultancy into research into the outcomes of such consultancy? It's not a leap I want to take totally yet, but the applied end of research is an area I find fascinating.

'A list' clients

Whether directly, or via the excellent ArtHaus , I've got the most amazing list of clients for current projects. At the moment, I have work on for Lafarge, Unilever, ITV, IHG, Adecco and Diageo. I just have to put in a 'blue chip' performance now.