The power of marginal gains

When we think of making changes in our work or life, we’re often focused on the BIG outcome. Whether it’s a personal change like getting fit and losing weight, or a professional change like taking the next step in our careers, our minds gravitate towards the end goal. While that can be inspiring, it can also be intimidating, because it’s hard to understand how change happens at that level. Sudden and instant change – the ‘overnight success’ – might be desirable and headline-worthy but it rarely, if ever, happens that way.

One of the most famous examples of this is the British Cycling team and their impact on the sport during and beyond the 2008 Olympics. Having won just one gold medal in the prior 100 years, the team went on to win 60% of those available in 2008. On the surface, this looked to many like a sudden and seismic change, but in reality, it was a result of 5 years of tiny incremental improvements in every dimension of the sport, from the design and management of the bikes to the development and preparation of the riders. With a new team manager, the focus had shifted from ‘How to win a gold medal’ – the BIG outcome, to ‘How to improve each dimension by 1%’.

1% is such a SMALL change, almost imperceptible, yet by compounding a series of small improvements – known as the power of marginal gains – you can deliver BIG change over time. Fun fact: A 1% improvement every day for a year means you’ll be thirty-seven times better by the end of that year. Bonkers!

The same principle used so successfully by the British Cycling team can be applied to nearly anything, the key is to break that thing down into the fundamental elements and focus on incremental improvement at the smallest level. That was perhaps the real innovation that the British Cycling team recognized; they were able to deconstruct Cycling into its component parts (bike elements, rider health & nutrition, preparation, etc), and then go to work on improving each part by 1%.

If you have set a big goal for yourself to “be a better leader,” like many of the leaders and influencers we work with every day, here’s some great news for you: we’ve done a lot of the hard work for you.  Just like the British Cycling team, we recognised that if we were going to help people make impactful and lasting changes as leaders, we needed to identify the component parts of leadership. The result of that work, based on our 35+ years of experience in working with managers and leaders all over the world, is our Whole-Mind Manager model. It breaks leadership down into the vital behaviors that make that success possible, defined with sufficient detail to understand how you could make a 1% improvement each and every day in that particular behavior. Participants on our leadership programs, which we have built on the Whole-Mind Manager framework, report a 43% performance improvement as managers. That’s like the impact of adding two more days to your working week, without any extra effort!