Come on strong

Hands up, all high-performing individuals. You know who you are. Maintaining your edge under extraordinary circumstances takes a special kind of human performance.

For the past 15 years, Tignum has been partnering with elite business clients including Novartis, Adidas, Intel, Ebay and the International Olympic Committee. Its bespoke approach provides pragmatic and tangible ways to manage fatigue, improve mental agility, adaptability and resilience, and to reduce the risk of overload.

Last year, Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of data and insights used for business decisions, went through a huge transformation and executed a successful IPO in July 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. For Dun & Bradstreet’s chief people officer, Tignum’s partnership was a key element to her success.

change your mind

Roslynn Williams

Chief people officer, Dun & Bradstreet

Why did you engage Tignum? Dun & Bradstreet is a special company. We are 180 years old and have had four former US presidents work for us. The company has a soul – with an employee base that is mission driven. That’s why Tignum was a perfect match. When I joined Dun & Bradstreet six years ago, we wanted to build a workforce that understood what high performance looked like. With Tignum as a foundation, we wanted our workforce to know how to create strong personal readiness of brain and physiology and how to bring their best self to work. How can I be an energy giver? How do I adapt during uncertain, high-stress times?

How did Tignum help you weather last year? In 2019, we were taken private and, as a result, changed key parts of our operating framework, our go-to-market strategy and our organisational structure, and executed three acquisitions. In 2020 we shifted the entire company to working from home. We executed our IPO and ran diligence on a European acquisition target — all while remote. Personally, Tignum was at the core of how I showed up in times of uncertainty through focused problem-solving with intentional actions centred on listening and adapting to execute with a results orientation. All that I learnt from Tignum was at the centre of how I succeeded in being my best self for my team and the company.

game on

Scott Peltin

Co-founder & chief performance officer, Tignum

How has your background helped you define the Tignum approach? I was a firefighter for 25 years. My skills are battle-tested. They work when you’re awake through a 24-hour shift. Fatigue can destroy you so the difference that precisely designed micro and macro recovery cycles can make is huge.

I learnt how important transitions are. When you are dispatched on a call, it takes four to six minutes to get there. It’s a perfect transition for you to get ready to respond to what’s ahead: mentally, physically and emotionally. The most challenging calls are the ones where someone knocks on the door of your firehouse and hands you their baby who isn’t breathing. You quickly realise: when I don’t have a transition, this is brutal. I looked at business people and saw that there was no transition for them – it’s meeting after meeting.

What is the difference between high performers and sustainable high performers? There are times when talent is enough — when everything aligns, I showed up, the deal was there and I was on it. Those are high-performance days. In sport, you see it all the time. The difference though, is that in business you can only do that for so long because, unlike in sport, there’s not just a game every Friday. There are game equivalents five times in a day. This is where sustainability becomes so important. Am I as good Friday afternoon as I was Monday morning? And if not, the inconsistencies kill you. Sustainable high performers use sustainable human performance strategies consistently at a very high level. What’s interesting is, we’re often not trying to raise the top bar because they already have the talent. We’re trying to raise the bottom bar so they consistently show up at a high level. That’s the game-changer.

How do you remain sustainable? When you look at people who have to perform well, they’re very conscious about what they need to do to be the best. There has to be the right mindset to bring their talent to fruition and a readiness to be agile wherever this negotiation or that conversation goes. But there will always be something unexpected just as you’re going into a huge meeting. That’s the world we live in, so we need mental agility and the ability to change gears, to recognise distractions and refocus, and to change our priorities quickly. And that’s a whole new set of strategies and tools that we provide.

Next month, we speak to Tignum co-founder Jogi Rippel about Tignum X, its toolbox and how they bring leaders and their teams from exhausted to energised, overwhelmed to in control, fragile to resilient, frozen to adaptable and mentally agile. Tignum X is a key layer to enhance professional success.

To find out more, visit tignum.com