"Personnel Best"

Providing your team members with incentives is just one way to help improve their performance. PMW talks to four motivational experts.

Ever wondered how to get the best out of your people? Perhaps your chief mechanic is getting overly nervous during refuelling, costing the team vital seconds, or maybe a string of mechanical failures means that morale has hit an all-time low in the engineering department?

Meet John Sylvester, director of Performance and Motivation Management. Established 40 years ago, P&MM aims to “deliver innovative, exciting, and effective solutions that improve the performance of employees”.

Help comes from a “proven, four-step formula” that can be applied to ensure team managers get the best out of their personnel – even if they are at a low ebb.

“The start point is for the team to be realistic in the objectives it is pursuing,” says Sylvester. So no point aiming for six podiums this year if you finished last in the constructors’ race the previous season!

Step two would see team bosses establish a reward scheme in synch with the company structure: “There needs to be a bonus and recognition system in place when the achievements in step one are met by the team.” Sylvester says some form of recognition is essential for the program to work. “Whether it’s a paid bonus, a bottle of wine or a pat on the back from the CEO, what’s important is for the team and individual to be recognized for meeting outlined targets.”

Step three focuses on communication, which, says Sylvester, is a part of management that is often over looked as, “there are always other things to do”. He adds: “Many employers don’t communicate as well as they should. Communication should not just be about the business, but also how a mechanic is doing against the objectives in step two.”

And the fourth and final step? “Team managers must remember that if the goals in step two are achieved, the company needs to reward the employee.”

If team managers adopt such a model over a six- to 18-month cycle, Sylvester says he’s confident that team efficiency can be increased by up to a staggering 20 per cent.

Someone else focusing on mental and emotional fitness is Aaron Surtees, a fully qualified hypnotist who runs the City Hypnosis practice in London.

“The mind, not the body, often stops sports professionals from achieving their optimum performance. My hypnosis program replaces the mental doubts, fears, insecurities and uncertainties with mental confidence. This enables the mind to remain focused to succeed in the challenge at hand.”

Surtees says the key is to help professionals to successfully transfer what they do every day in training t the actual race, when the pressure is on. As a result Surtees’ hypnosis program can also be tailored to team personnel. “I can apply a similar process to team engineers who might, for example, have pit stop problems. It’s all to do with controlling adrenaline and remaining calm and focused in the heat of the moment.”

Surtees says only three sessions are required before team bosses will see changes: “One of the greatest advantages to hypnosis is that it tends to work quickly. It’s not like a talk shop or other types of therapy that might take longer.”

Andy Barton, sports psychologist, certainly thinks it’s good to talk. Barton, who runs the Sporting Mind clinic in London, says: “I get people to think positively and motivate people to achieve the right results. Essentially, we find ourselves performing badly because we are not using our minds in a positive way.”

He continues: “A team mechanic might not be performing as well as he can during a pit stop because he’s become very conscious of what he’s doing. When one becomes conscious, one tends to lose trust in ability and skills and it’s at that point when a mechanic will not perform to the best of their abilities.”

To overcome such a problem, Barton employs mental rehearsal techniques. He explains: “Helping an engineer to practice in his/her head time and time again what they need to do during a pit stop can be very effective. Take Michael Schumacher: he makes a very vivid mental note of the entire circuit and that’s what has helped him win race after race. The same can be done with team personnel when they are called upon to do their job in a high-pressure situation.”

Getting the best out of your team is not just about stimulating the brain – keeping personnel in top physical condition is just as important.

Graham Smith, chair of the Society of Sports Therapists and founder of the Physiotech centre in Glasgow, UK, explains: “Sports therapy is massively important in all sporting sectors. Effectively everyone in the motorsport team has to be looked after. Mechanics play a massive role in maintaining the car and sometimes the difference between winning and losing a Grand Prix can come from which team makes the quickest pit stop.

“The speed that the mechanics are able to change the tires at, and put the fuel in, basically meant that at this year’s Bahrain Grand Prix, Alonso came out of the last pit stop ahead of Schumacher. If the mechanics had been less fit, had been one second slower, Renault wouldn’t have won that race.”

Dean Slavnich

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