Aim High – even if you hit a cabbage
Tanni Grey-Thompson credits this unusual saying from her grandfather as an inspiration that helped a disabled child become a paralympic champion and ultimately reach the House of Lords in recognition of her achievements. She will be a keynote speaker at the Airmic Conference from 6-8 June.
Tanni, or to use her title Baroness Grey-Thompson, is known for her 11 gold medals as a champion wheelchair racer. Over her career, she broke 35 world records. Today, she is a cross-bench member of the House of Lords. Asked about her experience of risk management, however, Tanni seems slightly puzzled. It’s soon clear that her career as a professional athlete and now as a cross-bench politician inherently involves managing risks.
She explains, for example, that in wheelchair racing, a key preparation was to practise scenarios – a lot. For instance, she worked out with six of the men’s squad who did their best to block her or push her out. That way she made decisions about strategy that were in her head when she was in a competition. She was prepared for the most likely challenges.
So much of the work of an athlete is preparation and avoiding injury is part of the risk management. “Coming down the Tyne Tunnel at 45 mpg, your brakes don’t work. Other wheelchair athletes have been killed on the roads. You have to weigh that up, but you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what can go wrong,” Tanni comments.
There is crisis management, too. On one occasion Tanni’s racing chair got a puncture 10 minutes before the start of a race when no mechanical support was available. She was responsible for changing the tyre. This was a scenario she’d practised many times, but rehearsals were different from 10 minutes before the race start. A friend helped. The tyre got changed. Tanni competed and set a world record. “I don’t know, but it might have helped!”
Expectations can be hard. “When you’ve won, people assume you’ll win every time. When you’re winning, everyone wants to be your friend. When you lose, people can be disappointed. You find who your true friends are. It’s critical to have good, sensible friends.” This advice, she says, applies in sport, and to the workplace, too.
Now active in the House of Lords in politics, particularly advocating for the disabled, she says: “There are a lot of similarities between athletics and politics, except that as an athlete you are working for yourself and in politics you’re working for other people.”
Tanni also prepares methodically for her speaking engagements, finding out as much as she can about the audience. “I try to connect with the audience, have similar themes. If a speaker doesn’t do that, it’s just 45 minutes when people could be having coffee instead.”