#044 Why lessons from sport can sideline business success
Hello,
Welcome to The Future Of Leadership, an approximately monthly newsletter packed full of leadership wisdom for CEOs and senior technology executives.
It was a tie for the most clicked link last month between my virtual library (a list of all the books I've read) and one of my most popular articles The Duck-Rabbit and the Polarities of Leadership.
What I'm writing about
Big Think hosts some of the world's leading thinkers. So, I was honoured when they asked me to write an article for them about the challenges that can arise from comparing business and sports. Click the link below to read it:
“Playing tennis on Mars”: Why lessons from sport can sideline victory in business."
What could Kobe Bryant have taught you about being a better CEO? What can you learn from Bill Belichick about driving your team’s performance? With their shared focus on performance and winning, and because our brains are wired to think in analogies and metaphors, it’s quick and easy to draw comparisons between sport and business leadership. But it can also be lazy and problematic".
How is business and leadership different from sports?
Constantly changing goalposts - in sports, rules and objectives are fixed, but in business, the "goalposts" often shift due to unpredictable market dynamics, technological changes, and competition.
Rate of feedback - sports provide immediate and clear feedback (for example, a missed serve or bad shot), enabling athletes to quickly adjust their techniques. In business, feedback is often delayed, ambiguous, or incomplete.
Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect - the concept of deliberate practice works well in stable, 'kind' environments (for example, mastering technical skills), but business operates in a 'wicked' environment where adaptability is key.
You can also read the article on my own website, and add your thoughts to the discussion on LinkedIn.
What I'm reading
Jennifer Garvey Berger's first book Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World introduced me to the world of leadership in complexity.
I'm just finishing Jennifer's second recently published book Changing on the Job, Second Edition: How Leaders Become Courageous, Wise, and Steady in an Anxious World. Whilst the book's theories aren't for everyone (I've spent the last 8 years wrapping my head around them), it will challenge your thinking in many ways. I'm particularly taken by Jennifer's concept of 'complexity fitness' as something for us all to be continually working on:
"Everything you think or do is shaped by how big a world you can comprehend, how many perspectives on reality you can hold, how much you go with your pre-existing assumptions versus questioning and crafting them".
Articles and resources I read and shared with clients this month:
The CEO as elite athlete: What business leaders can learn from modern sports - "For today’s chief executive officers, there’s a lot to learn from [sport's] remarkable progress. And the need is urgent, primarily because the playing field has become radically more difficult. CEOs are on the job 24/7, responsible for addressing an ever-shifting array of problems and threats, even when there is incomplete information (usually) and when every move is under scrutiny (constantly). Not only do CEOs have to deal with a wide range of stakeholders, all of them with their own priorities, but employees are increasingly demanding - as they should be. Plus, technology is changing at warp speed, and the geopolitical environment is unsettled. When companies slip up, they are judged harshly, not least through social media". Coincidentally, published by McKinsey and written by the firm's global managing partner around the same time I published my Big Think piece.
People Don't Actually Know Themselves Very Well - "Any time a trait is easy to observe or hard to admit, you need other people to hold up a mirror for you. Romantic partners and close friends might be more informed, because they’ve observed you more - but they can also have blurrier vision, because they chose you and often share that pesky desire to see you positively. You need people who are motivated to see you accurately. And I’ve come to believe that more often than not, those people are your colleagues. The people you work with closely have a vested interest in making you better (or at least less difficult). The challenge is they’re often reluctant to tell you the stuff you don’t want to hear, but need to hear". Get in touch if you are exploring 360-Degree feedback for yourself or your leadership team.
What I'm working on
A shout out to an esteemed coaching colleague, Ed Batista, who is running his Art of Self-Coaching for CEOs course (Presidents and C-level co-founders also eligible). Ed seriously knows his stuff and I can only imagine how beneficial this group programme will be. Follow the link to find out more and join a cohort.
Until next month,
