I have no issue with words like HIGH, PERFORMANCE, ELITE or HONESTY, CORE or BUSINESS when used individually.

I now have a huge problem when they are used together.

Once the ‘Elite Honesty’ term came to light with Australian Cricket I started to question some of the language I had also been using. I realized that I too had allowed myself to be sucked into the black hole of meaningless double speak.

I have often referred to High Performance (HP) but what is that? What does a manager of HP do? What is a HP department?

If you google HP this is what comes up,

“a concept within organization development referring to teams, organizations, or virtual groups that are highly focused on their goals and that achieve superior business results.”

Don’t we want this for everyone and for every department within a business? I certainly want our accountancy team and our legal team to be achieving ‘superior’ results. What about sales and marketing, design, IT and distribution? Oh, and what about the BOARD?

Who’s the manager of mediocre performance or poor performance?…you see where I’m going with this.

It’s meaningless.

What is Elite Honesty? Who comes up with this stuff? I can’t imagine what it must be like to walk into the dressing room as an Australian player and see Elite Honesty emblazoned on the walls, as was the case recently in Perth. Surely the measure of performance should be runs, wickets, catches, fairness, effort, competition and respect. Isn’t honesty enough, how do we be elitely honest?

I’m starting to understand what Yogi Berra, the NY Yankees catcher and manager meant when he said, “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.”

Meaningless doublespeak is everywhere. There’s Fake News, Core Business even in education we had ‘Functional Gramma’for a while, now it’s the 4 C’s? What’s the next? ‘box ticking’ exercise?

When I think about all of this plus the list of acronyms I no longer understand and the Business of FairBreak I’d like our organization to be kind, caring, respectful, fun, game changing, challenging, enlightening, profitable, supportive, inclusive and equal.

I want the people in it to own it and help shape it; I want it to be their Ship.

I don’t know if any of that is in a HP manifesto. The only ones I’ve seen have a lot of boxes to tick.

From now on I will only say, ‘I work with people’. HP be gone….. #elitehonesty

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” Yogi Berra

Was Yogi talking about High Performance departments? I’m starting to think he was onto something…..