The leader: a high-level athlete?
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For an athlete, the goal is to win medals or victories; for a company, it’s to gain market share or build sustainable business growth. Whether you're an athlete, entrepreneur, executive, or manager, the ambition is the same: to perform at your best, and coaching is one of the strategic partners that helps you get there, whether it’s to strengthen your mindset or develop your leadership talents.
It’s clear that many values from the world of sports translate easily into the business world: teamwork, courage, mutual support, going beyond limits…
For example, rugby is rooted in both conquest and camaraderie. In football, simplicity of rules and the power of the collective take precedence. To shape or reposition an athlete’s ambition, or a leader’s, it takes preparation, strategy, the right mindset, trials and errors, objectives, and intermediate results. Whether in sports or business, performance requires effort and mental resilience.
Coaching: understanding and empowering
One key function of coaching is understanding people: their true motivations, what they seek, how they think. It’s the coach’s role to help leaders incorporate this understanding into business decisions. Their “training” involves profiling the people they work with, recognizing their own blind spots and talents, and calibrating the right level of pressure to bring out the best in themselves.
For athletes, results are visible immediately. For business leaders, it’s more complex. They must read and adjust nonverbal communication, analyze reactions, understand their weaknesses, and manage their ego — all crucial to leading a team effectively.
Coaching roots: from the field to the boardroom
Timothy Gallwey, a Harvard educator and former top-level tennis player, helped bring coaching into the corporate world in the 1980s by observing the authoritarian and command-heavy coaching styles in sports. Similarly, Bill Campbell, a former American football coach, became a legendary executive coach to Silicon Valley leaders like Tim Cook, Sheryl Sandberg, Sundar Pichai, and Eric Schmidt, earning the nickname “the Trillion Dollar Coach.”
Both advocated for a Socratic approach based on questions rather than orders. Ask, “What direction was the ball spinning when you hit it?” instead of barking “Watch the ball!” This encourages learning, the key to building the right gesture for an athlete, or the right leadership posture for an executive.
The word coach itself comes from cocher (the driver of a carriage), which comes from Kocs, a Hungarian village known for building coaches. The origin reflects the coaching principle: not to tell someone what to do, but to guide them, to help them give birth to their own solutions through questioning and reflection.
Coaching is most effective in a culture that values developing strengths into excellence, a concept well-established in high-performance sports.
The importance of goals for a winning strategy
In business, we talk about 5- or 10-year visions, strategic pillars, and 1- to 3-year projects. Strategy serves the vision (the ultimate ambition), and the project is its concrete, operational translation. A good goal is both ambitious and achievable, and tied to measurable KPIs.
Depending on the goal’s timeframe, the coach helps their client craft a strategy based on their starting point, potential, opportunities, competencies, and available resources.
In sports, training plans are built with intermediate objectives, like low-stakes competitions to test oneself, or qualifiers that serve as milestones. Performance is easy to measure with a stopwatch or a goal count. For executives, it’s different. Here, the coach’s role is to help the client identify and formalize the skills they are building or reinforcing through challenges.
I’m currently coaching a high-performing leader who has little regard for his own manager’s leadership. Together, we’ve been working on the critical skill of “managing your manager,” to help him learn from his boss’s strategic abilities, risk-taking, and influence with the board.
When Aimé Jacquet recounts how he flew to England to announce to Eric Cantona that he would be left off the team — because “like a conductor, you have to combine talents, not just add them up” — it becomes a powerful leadership message.
A project is also about people: the power of collective intelligence
Whether in sports or business, project success hinges on the team. Every individual involved, consciously or not, influences the process and the outcome: the performance. Coaches in sports have long understood the power of recognition, intrinsic motivation, and collective strength. They surround themselves with the right people, at the right time, in the right place.
In both arenas, recruiting or mobilizing the right team members and partners is key to winning the match, earning the medal, or completing the project successfully.
Learning to "convert the try" (rugby metaphor) is what leads to sustainable performance, whether in the coach/athlete or coach/leader duo. The athlete aims for victory, and the leader aims for expanded leadership, transformation, collaboration, and long-term performance.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
– African proverb
Just as a sports captain must know their teammates, a business leader must identify each team member’s potential to empower them and boost performance. A manager’s role is to highlight strengths and develop skills so that everyone feels they belong.
In business, the leader selects and nurtures the team. They may outsource certain roles due to lack of expertise, time, or to speed up transformation. That’s where the sparring partner — the coach — steps in, helping the leader fulfill their mission of developing people and teams.
Sport teaches the right to fail
Only those who fall can learn to rise again. Collective strength helps reframe mistakes and failures as learning opportunities. A lost match during the season, or a missed milestone, should be analyzed and transformed into actionable insight.
Legendary coach Bill Campbell encouraged open dialogue to release tension and address frustrations. I’m currently working with a team whose siloed managers don’t communicate enough. Together, we worked on restoring performance and joy at work, using a 360° approach with two simple questions for team reflection:
What does this person need from the team to succeed in their job?
What makes them happy to come to work?
Business and sport: parallel paths to performance
Whether you’re an athlete or not, developing performance works the same way in elite sport and business:
Strengthen the mind
Grow your skills
Manage the ego
Encourage leaders to coach their teams
True transformation happens when coaching mindsets ripple throughout the team. That’s when I know the transformation is real and sustainable.
And you? How do you make time to grow, to be coached, and to coach your teams so they grow too? That’s what builds real engagement.
In summary:
A high-level athlete surrounds themselves with a team: psychologist, coach, sports trainer, osteopath, massage therapist…
A leader should too, for balance and well-being.Resilience is key, whether it’s after an injury, a burnout, or a post-Covid slump. Everyone goes through life or career setbacks. Preparing your resilience is essential.
Set ambitious medium-term goals, and give yourself the time and space to build the energy and the right team to achieve them.
Formalize your winning strategies for skill development, be it multicultural fluency, political acumen, or leadership, and see every challenge as a learning opportunity.
Wishing you a great summer, and take good care of yourself!
Here’s what I’ll be reading this summer: The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, Becoming an Agile Company by Ludovic Cinquin, and The Culture Map by Erin Meyer.
And you?
#leadership #sportscoaching #management #strengths