Stir the Pot: Leading Beyond Comfort to Drive Elite Performance

A leader’s role is to gently stir the pot when too many morsels have settled at the bottom.

In other words, leaders need to disturb the comfortable. The comfortable soon become complacent – and complacency is but an earlier death when it comes to a high-performing business.

This is why – after being an early adopter of WFH, several years before the onset of Covid – EG recently took the decision to implement a 10- week trial of no WFH days.

We wanted to break and reset the patterns that had formed during Covid, just to make sure they were still serving us well. The research shows that it takes about 60 days to break a habit, hence the 10-week trial.

Here’s why we did it:

• WFH is increasingly being regarded by employees as a fundamental human right – and that’s not right.
• Pre-Covid, about one third of EG’s workforce worked from home for at least one day in any given week. In 2024, that percentage had risen to 90%. Was WFH being adopted by default?
• Team communications (as measured by texts, emails and calls) fell by about 25% during WFH days.

Elite teams insist on nothing other than elite performance. They welcome WFH if it serves the cause, and spurn it where it does not.