A long way to go for fish and chips

I rode to the seaside on Sunday. A lovely day out you may think. Only I live in Bedford – 142 kms from the nearest beach (Hunstanton according to Google).

Oh, and we also hadn’t chosen Hunstanton to ride to. No – we chose Brighton. A mere 200+ kms from Bedford. In the rain. 🌧️ What joy.

Iain, Richard, Gary and I have done a few cycling adventures together as a team. But I hadn’t planned to join this ride. I was nervous that the team had moved on. After all, between them there is one very successful multi-triathlon competitor and two younger models who are three weeks out from Ironman Barcelona.

I’ve spent the year recovering from a disc bulge in my spine, spinning it with the social rides at my local club…

Then about 10 days ago one Richard dropped me a direct message asking if I was joining them. I told him I was worried about holding them back. A few minutes later he replied:

‘We’d just like you there if you can, as it’s kind of tradition now & we like you being with us. :)’

It’s nice to be wanted, and it was a lovely message; but the facts still stood: all three of them are significantly faster cyclists than me. And it’s a long way to carry someone.

Yet this Sunday we did ride together to Brighton. And we started and finished as a team.

There was no underlying tone of “hurry up” – even when I spent large stretches about half a mile behind. Because I knew that come the top of a climb, or a significant junction, we’d regroup - and off we’d go again.

I knew this because we discussed it up front.

I’d laid out my concerns on the table before the ride and we agreed a plan. The guys wanted to do the ride with me, I wanted to do the ride with them, but we knew there was a gap in pace. So, we worked out how to tackle that in advance.

Like teams in organisations: it’s the unspoken issues that almost always get in the way.

This is backed up in research done by team effectiveness experts, Meta Team. Their data, from thousands of teams, tells us that the top two things that constrain leadership team performance are Low Candour (41%) and Signal Distortion (21%).

Basically – no-one talks honestly to each other, and they all understand different things.

The kind of recipe for disaster that Professional Cycling teams go out of their way to avoid.

The now cancelled Netflix documentary show “Tour de France Unchained” showed us the inside track on this. For the best teams we saw daily briefings on the bus, open dialogue on what the stage’s expectations were, and clear roles for everyone. For the less successful ones – infighting, factions, and unclear strategy.

Luckily our little peloton of four at the weekend intuitively adopted the more productive behaviours. We knew the route, we knew the stops, we knew the plan of engagement.

And so, I was ready – mentally and practically. Rain jacket ready, bone conducting headphones round my head for solo riding podcasting, the route with stops all programmed into my Garmin.

A long day in the saddle indeed. But as we sat in the evening drizzle on the beachfront – eating fish and chips and drinking a pint of beer – we toasted a successful team performance.

And we agreed we need to do it again. Maybe when it’s a bit sunnier though.

If you are interested in the work I do, lifting the lid on what’s holding teams back using the Meta Team diagnostic – get in touch.

Even better – give me a week to get the data from them and I can even show you exactly where your team needs to focus.