Why is my work important to your performance?
In my near 15 years experience in high performance management, coaching and business management I have learnt that there are three areas that keep teams and individuals from getting the desired results from their strategic plans:
1. How they think about their vision and what they want to achieve;
2. How they plan their environment to create focus towards their vision;
3. How they act intentionally to make progress a consistent habit.
If you aren’t showing results for your strategic effort you may be failing in any one or all of the above areas. Effective execution happens when there is a clear relationship between all three.
Teams and Individuals can adapt the same think > plan > act framework to achieve their strategic outcomes in their own specific ways.
Build the team or business that executes their strategy
As manager of a Team, you need a customised performance system in which your objectives and culture are a clear reflection of your team or company vision. You should be able to answer the following questions:
- What is our Vision and is it clear enough for our team to understand?
- How should leadership communicate the vision to the team to inspire buy-in?
- How should planning around environment, resources & people prioritise team or company objectives?
- How does leadership create a culture of engagement that motivates outcome-focused team behaviour?
Become the successful performer that has always inspired you
As an Individual high performer, you require a personal performance system that makes your desired achievements a reflection of your life purpose and answers the following questions:
- What do I want to achieve?
- How do I think and feel about successfully achieving my desired goals?
- How do I plan with focus so that my lifestyle creates a clear route to my goals?
- How do I make a habit of the behaviours that will get me to what I want to achieve?
Who is andri stander?
My name is Andri and thanks for reading this far.
I am a high performance fanatic. I am happiest when I can help develop environments that make it easier for people for to give their best in their pursuit of personal growth, achievement and enjoyment.
Besides assisting clients achieve what they want, I also enjoy sharing high performance lessons with the guests on my podcast, the High Performance Life with Andri Stander. You can also find me on afternoons coaching rugby and cricket wherever I feel I can help youngsters (and myself) grow. When I make the time, I like to pen some of my own thoughts on anything relating to high performance.
I’m a very committed family man, avid trail runner, music-and film lover, good food connoisseur and can bake a reasonably good homestyle bread.
After leaving school I never truly settled into one specific vocation. I could never see myself becoming an accountant, engineer, doctor or anything that required long periods of specialised study and qualification. This was mostly due to my interest in so many different areas of learning and work. I also wanted the time to follow other pursuits that fuelled my passions.
The major benefit of growing in so many areas has made me a specialist in objective perspective. I am able to share in most discussions, but I can also ask questions in those in which I have little experience. I can connect the dots between various topics and love finding relationships between things that seem otherwise disconnected. I love finding the small personal shifts that turn the big vision in a person or team’s mind into something real and actionable.
Background experience
- While completing a degree in Management Sciences at Stellenbosch University I started coaching rugby as a parttime hobby – this started a deep passion for seeing tactics and behaviour as the most important factors in strategy execution;
- After graduating in 2006 I started consulting as a real estate agent in Stellenbosch while studying an honours in Financial Management;
- My rugby coaching career continued to develop in 2009 at the University of Cape Town rugby club when I tackled another postgraduate qualification, this time in Sport Management;
- During this time I also worked as a TV-broadcaster, presenting on a schools’ rugby show on SuperSport;
- I entered the world of work in 2010 when I started as a business consultant for a small incentive-finance firm in Cape Town;
- In 2012 I landed my first dream job, as the Commercial Manager of Western Province Rugby’s professional rugby academy, the WP Rugby Institute;
- I grew in this position, finishing as the senior manager in charge of all academy operations, recruitment, performance-management and player professional development;
- By the beginning of 2020 I had been deeply involved in the processes of developing high performance strategies for teams and individuals, which included managing the welfare and performance coaching of a number of current professional rugby players representing the Springboks, local franchises and foreign club teams;
- Over an eight-year span working in professional rugby I loved trying to answer the question: ‘What makes high performance happen?’ – this question led me deeper into the workings of behavioural psychology and performance system development, a subject area that I am consistently exploring on a daily basis.
My major professional pursuit is to use this experience to help teams and individuals build performance systems that will ensure they execute the strategies that will answer their ‘what do we want?’ question.
