The following is a guest post by Dr. Graham Jones. I was approached recently by McGraw-Hill to review his latest book “Thrive on Pressure: Lead and Succeed When Times Are Tough”, which was published in August 2010. After reading his book, I welcomed the opportunity to have Graham share his thoughts on leadership and the lessons he’s learned from working with top athletes with my readers. You can learn more about Graham and his latest book by visiting his website, “Thrive on Pressure“.
The majority of business leaders I have worked with have a ravenous fascination with and curiosity about top-level sports. I have no doubt that most of them have secretly dreamed of being star athletes themselves. Whenever they find out about my involvement in the magical world of such people, they besiege me with questions. How do their heroes cope with sometimes over-intrusive interest in their professional and private lives? What are those people like? How do they motivate themselves to endure the intensity of training and practice they subject themselves to day in and day out? Why does the U.S. Ryder Cup golf team, with the best players in the world, so often struggle to overcome Europe’s team?
Business people are so fascinated with elite sports that companies pay vast fees to listen to inspirational talks by sporting legends. But what do they learn from them? Do their stories provide anything more than an opportunity to rub shoulders with names that will impress friends? How can listening to such stars change what executives do when they return to their desks? Some executives are skeptical that it can at all. They see their world as too different from one with such obvious and extreme motivators as Olympic gold medals and world championships.
Elite sports is a powerful metaphor for business, and there are some striking parallels. Fierce competition, winning by sometimes the smallest margins, achieving goals and targets, establishing long-term and short-term strategies and tactics, hard work, perseverance, determination, teamwork, dealing with success and recovering from failures and setbacks–those are all key challenges in both worlds. Success in sports and business alike relies on the ability to continually move performance to higher levels. What you achieve this year will never be good enough next year. Goals and standards move onward and upward, creating an unrelenting demand to find new means and methods to ensure the delivery of performance curves that can seem tantalizingly, or even impossibly, out of reach.
I have spent most of my career researching and understanding the world’s best athletes. In 1995, having long consulted with Olympic and world champions, I co-founded Lane4 Management Group, a performance consultancy. I’ve been applying the lessons I’ve learned from athletes with leaders at some of the world’s biggest companies ever since.
The first crucial lesson is that elite athletes are not born but made. Obviously there has to be some inborn natural ability–coordination, flexibility, anatomical and physiological capacity–just as successful senior leaders need to be able to both strategize and relate to people. But the real key to sustained excellence for both elite sports and business leaders is not the ability to swim fast or do quantitative analyses quickly in their heads; rather, it is the development of mental toughness.
The ability to thrive under almost inhuman pressure is perhaps the most defining characteristic of elite athletes. They excel when the heat is turned up. They are able to stay focused on the things that really matter in the face of a multitude of potential distractions. They are able to bounce back from setbacks with a determination and intense desire to succeed. And, most crucially, they are able to maintain their belief in themselves in the most trying circumstances.
What lessons can they bring to the most senior leaders of organizations? For the very best athletes, making it to the top is the result of very careful planning, setting and hitting hundreds of small goals. And if it’s hard reaching the top, that’s nothing compared to what it takes to stay there. Expectations are enormous, and you become the target and benchmark for every other competitor. You have reached heady heights and have become highly visible and exposed. It’s a marvelous place to be, but it also comes with great potential vulnerability and loneliness if things go wrong. Sustained success in such an environment requires astounding physical ability, but that isn’t enough to make you better than all the rest. You need an extraordinary mindset too. The positive and resilient mindsets of the best athletes underpin their drive and ability to reinvent themselves continuously in order to stay ahead of the pack. Does any of this sound familiar from your world?
Finally, especially important in today’s roller coaster business world, these elite athletes take time to celebrate their victories. It helps remind them why all the hard work and commitment is worthwhile. At a time when survival is a key priority in so many organizations, don’t forget to spend time celebrating successes, however small they may be.
My work with senior leaders and their teams over the last 15 years has focused on applying and adapting these lessons in their worlds. Of course, there are some differences between sports and business, but there are too many similarities and parallels to ignore. Perceiving them can help drive you and your organization to achievements and successes that others only dream about.
I first learned of this concept through an HBR article "Corporate Athlete." It talked about how corporate America wants their workers to perform at the highest level, but doesn't provide the training or rest/recovery they need to be at their best. Also look at the Military, they spend about 90% of their time training. If anything we can learn from this recession is to NOT cut on training and development because your employees are the ONLY way to turn things around!
That's a good point you bring up, Scott. It reminds me of something I remember reading a sports coach pointing out that the difference between the great athletes and everyone else is not genetics, but the fact that these athletes train so much that their muscles develop the habit of making those movements, leaving them to focus their mind more on anticipating what obstacles, environmental factors, or strategies from their opponent they'll be facing. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it, as many of the behaviours we do are not simply because we learned them, but because we kept repeating them to the point where we no longer think about it when we do it.
Thanks for your comment on Graham's piece. Glad you enjoyed it.
Solid post. I understand drawing the analogy of thriving under pressure to the performance of elite athletes. However, I have a few thoughts: 1.) Athletes are not exactly the best role models these days given their off field antics. 2.) Might be a tough analogy for women to relate to. especially if athletics were not part of their upbringing. 3.) Find the analogy that works best for you when it comes to honing your leadership skills. Famous people in history – Roosevelt. Jazz for Tanveer.
There are women athletes.
Love this post – it's so true! Good athletes also make great employees. Too often, I see a candidate's athletic experience listed as extracurricular. Anyone who has been involved in sports (with any seriousness) knows that it's a full time job. There's a lot of experience gained from being on a team, working together to achieve a common goal.
Keep up the great work!
Kirk Baumann
Director of Career Connections
SIFE USA – http://www.sife.org
Being a female Division I All-American Swimmer, which I consider elite (although not Olympic level), I can say that my personality and most definitely my leadership traits were shaped by years of training and competing. Elite athletics help develop discipline, time management, self-motivation, and many other important life skills.
Thanks Lauren for sharing your experience on this. I'd like to highlight your pointing out how it took years to refine and develop these skills. Too often, we tend to think of such efforts in terms of short-term goals or objectives when the reality is that it does take many years to hone and master. For me, this is why sports can be such a useful analogy because it crystallizes this approach and helps illustrate how such improvements come not from quick fixes, but from a committed plan of action that can span years.
Thanks again, Lauren for adding your thoughts to the discussion and sharing your own experience with this.
I enjoyed your post and am glad I could share my experience! It's hard to verbalize how swimming has shaped my personality over 13 years of early morning, lifting, dryland, and training. I completely agree that you can rarely change things and have them stick unless you do them repeatedly over time. I know I never successfully made minor changes in my techniques in just one practice. It took my coach reminding me over and over again and even watching underwater video. Just like athletics is very much muscle memory and practice, I believe that leadership is the exact same – memory and practice. Noticing where you can improve and working on those things. Not accepting "good" but striving for "great" and constantly trying to become better at whatever you do.