We’re currently enjoying a bumper year of sport including major events across football, tennis, world athletics, rugby, golf and, of course, the Olympics and Paralympics.
Elite sportspeople are in a class of their own – but how do they get there? And what lessons can leaders and managers take from the sporting world to enhance their own performances in the workplace?
Peak performance: seven winning lessons from sporting heroes
- Create a culture of continuous improvement: you can’t get away from it: you have to put in the hard yards. As Roger Federer, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, pointed out in his recent address to America’s prestigious Dartmouth College: “People would say my play was effortless. The truth is, I had to work very hard to make it look easy.”
- Cultivate commitment and resilience: In the same address, Federer revealed some astonishing statistics. He won almost 80% of the 1,526 matches he played in his career, but only 54% of the points. You have to become a master at overcoming adversity and fully committing to the next point with ‘intensity, clarity and focus’. That, said Federer, is the sign of a champion – and the sign of a great leader or manager.
- Take your team work to the next level: Babe Ruth, widely considered to be the best baseball player of all time, nailed this one: “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”
- Have self-belief: No one has said this better than Olympic champion and three-times world champion, Jessica Ennis-Hill, “The only one who can tell you ‘you can’t win’ is you and you don’t have to listen.”
- Be inspirational: The legendary American football player and coach, Ara Parseghian, understood the key to truly inspirational leadership: “A good coach will make his players see what they can be rather than what they are.”
- Stay positive: Described as the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan has this to say about failure: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
- Never stop learning: This is summed up by John Robert Wooden, a revered basketball coach renowned for his inspirational approach to leadership that is still influential across the sporting as well as the business world: “It’s what you learn after you think you know it all that really counts.” He also said: “Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you.”
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Developing Winning Teams: Discover how to build cohesive, motivated and productive teams, whether you’re starting from scratch, making some personnel changes or need fresh inspiration for an existing team.
