Ben Hunt-Davis MBE knows a thing or two about delivering under pressure. He was part of the GB Men’s Eight Rowing Team that won Olympic Gold at Sydney 2000 – a victory that hadn’t been achieved since 1912 - and theydid it by focusing on a deceptively simple question: “Will it make the boat go faster?”
Now, as co-founder of performance consultancy business Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, Ben helps executive and leadership teams align behind ambitious goals, focus on what really drives performance, and work better together. We caught up with him to explore three crucial questions business leaders should be asking right now.
1. Does your team have a clear and shared goal that guides everything they do?
“If you don’t know what your Gold Medal is, how can you win it?”
That’s the question Ben often puts to leadership teams. In sport, the goal is obvious - stand on the top step of the podium. In business, it’s often far less clear.
“The best-performing teams are the ones who have total clarity on what they’re trying to achieve,” Ben explains. “They don’t just have a strategy - they have a shared goal that genuinely excites and unites them.”
He calls this the ‘Crazy Goal’ - a bold, meaningful, emotionally engaging destination that galvanizes a team. It should be clear enough that anyone, from the CEO to employees at every level, can articulate it and understand how their work contributes to it. Having a Crazy Goal isn’t just about motivation. It becomes a powerful lens for decision-making.
Ben says: “Back in 1998, our rowing team wasn’t making the progress we wanted. So we asked ourselves a question before every decision: ‘Will it make the boat go faster?’ If the answer was yes, we did it. If not, we didn’t do it. It helped us stay laser-focused only on the things that progress us towards our goal.”
Ben encourages business leaders to ask similar questions:
Do you have a Crazy Goal that your whole team is aligned behind?
Would everyone in your organisation give the same answer if asked what your goal is?
Can you link what you’re doing today to where you want to be in the future?
When the answer is yes to those questions, it ensures energy and focus aligns to your goal.
2. Are you focusing on the right things to drive high performance?
“The best chance of getting great results is to stop focusing on results.”
It sounds counterintuitive, but Ben argues that focusing only on outcomes can be a trap. “Results are lagging indicators,” he says. “They tell you what happened, not why it happened.”
Instead, Ben encourages teams get curious about the ‘performance recipe’ - the specific behaviours, habits and routines that lead to success. “If you can understand the ingredients that lead to great performance, you can do more of what works - and change what doesn’t,” he says.
Business leaders should consider:
What are the behaviours, systems and ways of working that genuinely help you move faster?
What’s slowing you down - and how can you remove it?
Is what you do every day setting you up for success?
Ben recalls a leadership team that was frustrated by inconsistent results. “They were holding review meetings, but they were really just reporting meetings. No space to reflect, learn or challenge. Once they shifted the focus to performance - what was working and why - results improved fast,” he says. “In other words teams need to stop staring at the scoreboard, and start improving their play.”
Ben says: “High performance isn’t just about strategy or execution, it’s about how people work together to deliver those things. Too many leadership teams focus only on what needs to be done, and not enough on how well they’re working as a team.”
The Olympic rowing team’s breakthrough came when they started focusing on collective performance - trust, communication, challenge, commitment - as much as physical fitness or race strategy.
Ben sees the same principle at play in successful business teams. He says: “High-performing teams have high standards, but they also have high levels of trust and collaboration. They challenge each other, but they also support each other. By doing so they hold each other to account”
To improve team performance, he suggests asking:
Are we aligned on what we’re trying to achieve?
Do we challenge each other in the right way - constructively, not destructively?
Are we getting better at how we work together over time?
“Leadership teams, in particular, set the tone for the wider organisation,” says Ben. “If you’re not a high-performing team at the top, it’s unlikely you’ll have high-performing teams throughout the business.”
What would it take to make your boat go faster?
Ben’s message is simple: clarity of purpose, curiosity about performance, and commitment to team development. It’s a mindset that helped him win Olympic gold - and one that’s helping leadership teams across sectors do the same in their own arenas. As Ben puts it: “Great results don’t happen by chance. They happen by focusing on your performance as a team - and by asking the right questions.”
If you’d like to get in touch with Ben and his team to find out more about how they work with senior leadership teams to bring clarity on what they’re trying to achieve and make their boats go faster, get in touch atwillitmaketheboatgofaster.com.
If you’d like to get in touch with Ben and his team to find out more about how they work with senior leadership teams to bring clarity on what they’re trying to achieve and make their boats go faster, get in touch.
