Getting To The Top of the Hill

Getting a podium finish can be a deeply satisfying experience. Going onstage to receive your degree from your Dean of Faculty is also a richly rewarding experience. To complete a marathon and earn your medal and finisher-tee are also worth relishing. Getting to the top of the summit for Ironman Norseman – the extreme long distance triathlon – after the 37K mark of the marathon for a steep, rugged, climb up, may be just as memorable [at the time of writing, twice-Ironman World Champion, Tim DeBoom won the 2011 edition of Norseman. Full report on the Endurance Conspiracy website].

Education has always emphasised success through examination grades, as well as landing the best jobs. Plaudits and pundits have agreed that it is better to be at the top of the game and stay on top, instead of being at the rank bottom. Our language is peppered with altitude-raising language like ‘top-dog’, ‘top scorer’, ‘top student’, ‘head honcho’, ‘high-flyer’, ‘corporate ladder’, ‘top rung’, ‘topping your performance’ and ‘head of the class’. Even the alter-ego of television known as Reality TV flouts highly-important titles like ‘Top Chef’, ‘Top Model’, ‘Top-40 Hits’ and the like. Here are the top-50 leadership blogs for 2010.

We, at Leadership Lessons from Triathlons, are already into our third year of sharing our content. We hope to get onto one of these prestigious lists in the near future. We have earned a few badges of merit in the past two years like appearing on AllTop, The Entrepreneur Blog, and currently a top-100 ranking for a leadership blog.

Google recently ranked us as #2 on its encrypted version, and #9 on its standard version for ‘Leadership Lessons’. It is an honour to be ranked just below Time magazine. We are, currently, #86 for the top leadership blog on Invesp.com. We boast no authors, television celebrities and renowned experts – well, at least not yet, however we do have a panel of excellent featured guests, and stories on excellent people. Everyday People with Extraordinary talents, abilities and lives – these are what we are motivated by, and strive to bring to you.

All these numbers mean little unless we stay current, contemporary, and fresh in our content. Our success is measured by our scope and depth of collaboration with others, degree of connectivity with our readers, and feedback from our readers.

*****

All the best to participants of Ironman Regensberg in Germany: Matthew, Clifford, Mano, Conrad, Chris and Angeline. Have a splendid race! Congratulations to Don Ng and Tee Boon Tiong for completed the grueling, extreme long-distance triathlon, Norseman! We extend our long distance kudos to this Dynamic Duo for being the first Singaporean and Malaysian to complete this race within the cutoff. Enjoy your top-of-the-world feeling!

Ranking & Your Place In the Universe

How much does ranking matter to you?

Every year, we are exposed to rankings of countries in numerous categories of interest: best airport in the world, safest country, least corrupted country for business, most tourists, etc. Both print and broadcast media play up and leverage on these data, accolades and awards; and countries, committees and communities do challenge these well-intentioned measures if they discover that they pale in comparison to others.

At the workplace, we have performance appraisal and ranking – your chance for promotion hinges on this. If your work is noticed, and you are known as a performer among the managers, you may have a better shot when they do their confidential ranking process. In sports, ranking indicates your performance against others within a race, the sport, and your competitive peers. The processes of peer-ranking and peer-appraisal (especially in 360-Degree Feedback System) can also yield useful information and feedback.

British uber-triathlete, Chrissy Wellington just ranked as the fastest woman over the Ironman-distance in Challenge Roth. She was the fastest woman, broke the world record timing for women, and ranked fifth overall! That means that she out-performed many male professionals in that race. Singaporean 5,000-metre track specialist, Mok Ying Ren was a SEA Games gold medalist in triathlon who excelled in marathons and half-marathons since he made the shift to single sport.

The reason why we race could include:

1)    Motivation to finish a course.

2)    Motivation to complete a physical event for the first time.

3)    To compare our personal performance against previous data.

4)    To gain confidence with each better performance.

5)    To review evaluate our performance, racing strategies, and analyse our results and investment.

6)    To test our physical and mental limits to a new challenge.

7)    Benchmarking our performance against others in the same field.

This two-year-old blog on leadership was #2 on Google Search on ‘Leadership Lessons’ over the last two weeks, and slid down serpentine fashion to top-50, then back up at #2, just behind two major print/online magazines. Realistically, this should happen due to a myriad of factors like SEO ranking and positioning. The more active you are in your content provision, are up-to-date, contemporary, and in your connections (networking) the more likely you will gain a higher prominence. We also moved from relative obscurity to #86 for Leadership Blogs measured against a comprehensive cache of online tools. What these measurements do is encourage us to do better, and provide more useful content to our loyal readers. That is why engagements (comments, feedback, requests) are useful to lead us to where you would like to go.

I did share that I placed three positions off my rankings in running races and multi-sport races over the past year, and I used these results to steer my training and racing strategies towards better recent showings. I evaluated my results, analysed them, and then adjusted my strategies to meet future goals and ambitions.

Leadership Lessons: Be aware of the various ways to raise awareness of your top performers on your team. Help find ways to recognize your team throughout the year. Place them in a place of most potential (as Dewitt Jones stated). Use reference points and guideposts to measure your staff performance, and create new strategies to help them excel. Ensure that each member is more than adequately trained, exposed, experienced and prepared for any conditions and exigencies. Teach them to cook and eat. Life is about experiences that we can relish in!