In today’s workplaces, performance is often seen as a constant sprint, pushing harder, faster, and longer to keep up with increasing demands. But just like elite athletes know, real success doesn’t come from endless intensity; it comes from balance, rhythm, and recovery.
In this article, Performance Psychologist Liz Gould, explores how organisations can move beyond short-term wins to create sustainable performance - a way of working that fuels long-term results without draining people, teams, or culture. Drawing on lessons from high-performance sport and decades of leadership consulting, Liz shares practical strategies leaders can apply to unlock resilience, engagement, and productivity that lasts.
If you’ve ever watched ahigh-performing sports team, you’ll know that peak results don’t come from constant all-out effort. Athletes train hard, but they also recover, recalibrate, and reset. There’s a rhythm.
Yet in most corporate environments, we expect high energy, all the time. And while this can deliver short-term wins, it’s rarely sustainable for people, teams, or the organisation.
Sustainable performance is the ability to deliver high-quality results over time without draining the very resources that make those results possible - health, motivation, and capacity. It’s about working smarter, recovering deliberately, and leading with rhythm so performance remains high without creating burnout, disengagement, or organisational fatigue.
This isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about shifting from short-term intensity to long-term consistency. And that shift is very much about intentionality. In complex, high-change environments, resilience, clarity, and adaptability aren’t “soft” skills. They’re core performance levers.
Contrary to the outdated belief that wellbeing is a reward for high performance, the evidence shows it’s a prerequisite. When people feel psychologically safe, physically well, and emotionally supported, they focus better, collaborate more effectively, make stronger decisions, and adapt faster under pressure.
Sport understands this intuitively. Recovery isn’t an optional extra - it’s programmed into training blocks, tapering phases, and the off-season. In corporate life, however, performance is often treated as a binary: success or failure, good or bad, always on. In the clinical psychology world, we would call this kind of approach an irrational thinking style. Just let that sink in for a moment.
Imagine performance like a tidal system: High tide is the surge - adrenaline, urgency, intensity. Low tide is the renewal - rest, reflection, and recalibration.
If we try to hold high tide indefinitely, the system floods. That’s when burnout, disengagement, and decision fatigue creep in, even for our top performers. So instead of asking “How do we get the most out of our people?” the more powerful question is: How do we treat sustainable performance as a core business asset, not a side-line wellbeing initiative?
Drawing on 20+ years of working in high-performance sport and more than a decade in corporate leadership consulting, in collaboration with encountas, I’ve developed the Sustainable Performance Framework -six interconnected practice areas that bring the best of sporting systems into organisational life. These practice areas draw on a rich base of both sport and organisational psychology research from Self-Determination Theory to Psychological Safety, from Flow to the Job Demands-Resources Model. But the real power is in how these areas work together. So here they are.
In elite sport, clarity of purpose isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the foundation. Athletes know exactly what they’re working toward, and the “why” behind each training session. In organisations, this means ensuring people understand the broader mission, how their role contributes, and what success looks like. This is where Self-Determination Theory comes in - we need to foster autonomy (ownership of work), competence (skill mastery), and relatedness (a sense of belonging). I’ve recently discovered that at Atlassian, “Team Playbooks” clearly link individual roles to company missions and give employees visibility on the “why” behind projects, fostering autonomy and ownership. This is a great example of how organisations can link individual purpose to the organisational mission.
Are you a leader? Ask yourself these questions: Are your goals specific and challenging enough to inspire effort, without being overwhelming? Do individual team members understand how their work impacts the whole? Is there a visible pathway for growth and recognition? And I know you want to say yes to all the questions, but I want you to play the deeper game and really consider your answers.
In sport, overtraining is just as dangerous as undertraining. The best teams track workloads, schedule rest, and design recovery into the program (they actually call these micro and micro cycles fyi). The Recovery-Stress Balance Model tells us that without recovery, the system depletes - physically, cognitively, and emotionally. In corporate settings, recovery cycles might look like: Downtime after major project delivery; flexible work design following intense travel periods or strategic “quiet weeks” for thinking and planning.
It's interval training for the brain. Bursts of high effort, followed by deliberate pauses to recharge resources.
High-performing sports teams create environments where athletes can speak up about injuries, tactics, and team dynamics. In organisations, psychological safety is the same foundation. Without it, people play it safe, avoid taking risks, and hold back ideas. This isn’t just about being “nice.” It’s about creating conditions for honest dialogue, learning, and adaptability. Safety systems also mean having the right wellbeing structures - from EAP programs (onsite psychologists are highly recommended) to peer support networks which are embedded, not bolted on.
Athletes achieve flow when their skills are stretched but not overwhelmed by the challenge at hand. In work, we can achieve the same through thoughtful job design, balancing demands with resources. Flow Theory and the Job Demands-Resources Model both remind us: mismatched roles drain energy. Well-designed roles align strengths to challenges, provide the right tools, and allow deep focus without constant interruption.
Again, are you a Leader? Ask yourself: Do people have the time, tools, and autonomy to do their best work? Think about it honestly. If your answer is no then you have a problem right now that needs to be addressed.
In sport, culture is deliberately built from team rituals to shared language and clear non-negotiables. Incorporate life, culture often emerges by accident. Yet culture is the architecture that holds performance up (or quietly erodes it). High-performance cultures in sport and business share traits such as a strong shared identity (we over me), clear behavioural standards (professional codes of conduct), and systems that align recognition, feedback, and development with the values you claim to live by. Netflix uses “Freedom and Responsibility” as a cultural anchor, reinforcing it in hiring, feedback, and recognition systems to keep the culture intentional, not accidental. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then Culture Architecture is the chef. Leaders must be intentional in designing systems that reinforce, rather than contradict, the culture they want.
Are you a leader? (I have lots of questions for you, don’t I!) … here's a hint. People watch. They observe your rituals, your language, and your behaviour. What are you role modelling? And is this aligned to the culture you need to perform safely and consistently?
In sport, leaders aren’t just captains, they’re performance multipliers. They inspire, protect the teams energy, and keep people focused when the pressure spikes. In organisations, Performance Ready Leadership means a few things like modelling sustainable work habits (leaders need to take recovery seriously too!) and balancing clarity of roles and expectations, and developing collective capability because sustainable performance is a TEAMSPORT. This is where leadership capability gaps can make or break the system. Microsoft’s shift under Satya Nadella from “know-it-all” to“ learn-it-all” leadership culture has created a more resilient, collaborative, and sustainable performance environment. There are some great clips on YouTube where he talks in more detail about this. When leaders assume they have all the answers because of their title, lack the skills to manage energy, create safety, and coach performance, the whole structure wobbles.
Are you a leader? Re-read my questions about Culture Architecture above.
I know some leaders bristle at the sport analogy, seeing it as an oversimplification, after all not every workplace operates like an elite team. And yes, the environments are different. But the underlying performance science such as the role of recovery, clarity, safety, and rhythm translates remarkably well when you strip away the surface differences. (A side note and a little fun fact for you, Organisational Psychology was born from Sport Psychology).
There’s a common misconception that all elite athletes are endlessly passionate about their sport. They’re not. Passion ebbs and flows, even in high-performance arenas. What sustains them isn’t just passion, but structure, recovery, and the systems around them. The same is true in workplaces: we can’t rely on passion alone to drive long-term performance, we need to build the environment that makes sustained effort possible. Just like elite teams, high-performing organisations don’t leave performance to chance. They design it, and they understand that wellbeing isn’t a reward for good performance. It’s the engine of it.
We can keep chasing high-tide performance and watch our talent erode under the pressure, or we can borrow from the playbook of elite sport by designing work with rhythm, recovery, and renewal built in. Sustainable performance isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing better for longer. And in a world where change is constant and complexity is rising, that might just be the most important competitive advantage you can have.
If you’re ready to bring rhythm, recovery, and resilience into your workplace, then let’s talk.
