Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in helping leaders and organizations crack their activation codes, finding the simple

tweaks to enhance both performance and engagement. Okay, question for you. Did you hear the one

about the British rowing team that took home the Olympic gold in 2000?

The short version is this. The GB8 team's rowing performance in the 1990s was like not so great.

They were trying really hard, but they were achieving relatively little. Until one of the team members,

Ben Hunt Davis, declared a new and simple

training strategy. The team would ask an answer at every decision point, the question,

will it make the boat go faster? Each answer to this question informed everything,

from how they slept to how they ate, how they trained, how they partied,

how they selected equipment, and on and on.

This one small simple question delivered life-changing results because suddenly they no longer

needed to find the big unicorn strategy that would reinvent their performance.

They just needed a better way to make all of their decisions

in service of a meaningful outcome. As we think about the current state of the workplace and what

we're all wading through, you know, like the great gloom and burnout and overwhelm and disconnection,

I think this story offers us the four smartest questions that we can all be asking ourselves,

whenever we're in a moment that feels heavy or slow or overwhelming or just uninspiring.

Let's talk about them.

The first one is, do you have the right rowers rowing?

Because when you have the wrong people in the boat, it's never going to cross the finish in time.

You need all your stars in position. I ran a pulse check recently for a retail organization,

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