What can Business Leaders learn from Top Athletes?
In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex world, there are striking parallels between the demands and challenges faced by business leaders and top-level athletes. Both require strategic focus, relentless learning, data-driven decision-making, extraordinary mental resilience and the ability to perform under high pressure.
The development of sports science and technology – with new ideas on nutrition, recovery, game strategy, coaching, athletics and more – means that today's athletes in all sports are undeniably better than those of 25 years ago.
Today's business leaders have much to learn from this remarkable progress. One reason is that the playing field has become radically more challenging. Technology is evolving at breakneck speed in a highly competitive, global environment. Decision-making has to be fast, often with incomplete information, and the outcomes have significant implications.
McKinsey's 2024 study identified a number of traits required of 21st century leaders. It revealed that today’s best leaders are showing a shift in mindset compared to previous generations. This shift closely parallels how top athletes prepare, train and compete. Explore the 5 leadership practices of top athletes that business leaders can integrate in their work.
The 5 leadership practices business leaders can adapt from great athletes
1. They use their time purposefully to set the conditions for top performance
One key practice is the importance of using time purposefully and creating the conditions for top performance. Some tasks and decisions have a disproportionate impact on success. Time management isn't just about scheduling; it's also about recognizing and preparing for high-stakes moments. This means business leaders must deliver their best performance when it matters most – just as top athletes do.
Top athletes don’t train at full intensity all the time. Instead, they structure their preparation around peak performance windows - tapering before competitions, focusing on specific skills, and conserving energy for decisive moments. As Roger Federer famously demonstrated, he won almost 80% of his tennis matches while winning only 54% of the total points played. He understood that it was more important to win the points that mattered most than to dominate every rally.
Business leaders must adopt the same mindset. So, when a decisive opportunity arises – a major customer pitch, a crisis or an expansion decision – they are ready to seize it without hesitation.
Achieving success is not a matter of constant exertion, but rather the ability to manage our time and energy wisely, so that we deliver peak performance when it counts most.
2. They are committed to continuous learning
Staying competitive in today's business world requires continuous learning, adaptability, and upskilling. Business leaders must embrace lifelong learning to stay relevant amidst technological disruptions and shifting consumer expectations.
In sports, take legendary boxer Manny Pacquiao, who won more world titles in more weight classes than any other boxer in history, during a career that lasted more than 2 decades. Early in his career, Pacquiao was basically a puncher who relied on landing one big blow for a knockout. Together with his trainer Freddie Roach, Pacquiao realized that his great left hand could only take him so far. So he developed a great right hand, too, and improved his footwork technique, which until then had been very slow. Together, he and his coach formed a learning team, adding new skills to their game and analyzing each of their opponents. The result speaks for itself.
The highest-performing leaders are deeply curious and eager to learn about other disciplines, other industries, and even other competitors. They seek out leading experts to fill in their knowledge gaps. The best CEOs always find new and orthogonal sources of insights. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, puts it simply: “The learn-it-all does better than the know-it-all.”
3. They embrace data and analytics to drive team performance and ultimate success
Formula 1 racing offers interesting parallels to business. It may be the ultimate team sport, as hundreds of people work to make one superstar driver (and thus the team) succeed.
F1 teams manage risks through technology. There are more than 300 sensors in an F1 car, measuring both the vehicle (including speed, tire pressure, fuel flow, temperature, and engine performance) and the driver (such as heart rate and blood oxygen levels). The steering wheel itself is a remote data interface. All this – as much as a billion pieces of data during a single race – is analyzed in real time so that the team can identify problems and transmit strategy changes to the driver or pit crew.
Even in F1, with all its technology, the human element is critical; the drivers are extraordinary athletes.
Modern CEOs routinely track personal and team data. The best CEOs are constantly improving their data and analytic skills, and those of their leadership teams. They use artificial intelligence, data analytics and other technologies to improve operations, create competitive advantage and generally raise their companies’ game. Speed matters, so they're always looking for ways to generate and analyze relevant information to move forward faster. They use analytics and other capabilities to improve how work gets done and how decisions get made, with the goal of putting their organizations in a position to win.
4. They are adaptable and resilient dealing with failures and setbacks
In the business world, setbacks are inevitable—be it a failed product launch, a market downturn, or internal conflict. Leaders can adopt the athlete's mindset of analyzing failures without dwelling on them, using them as stepping stones for future growth.
In sports, consider Muhammad Ali, one old-school athlete who would probably have fared well in the modern era. Ali was of course prodigiously gifted and trained exceptionally hard – unusual for his time. But perhaps his defining characteristic was grit. As he famously said, “You don’t lose if you get knocked down. You lose if you stay down.”
Leaders must have the resilience to bounce forward – never too high, never too low, learn from mistakes, and inspire their teams to persevere.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has made resilience a core part of the company’s management system, saying, “People with very high expectations have very low resilience, and, unfortunately, resilience matters in success.”
Making the change from the old ways to the new is a journey; it won’t happen overnight. Committing today and putting in the work is, for CEOs as much as for athletes, the only way.
5. They perfect the art of recovery to recharge and stay effective
Physical fitness and mental well-being are non-negotiable for athletes. They invest in nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mental coaching to maintain peak performance.
Recovery is an essential part of sports training as it allows the body to repair itself. Endurance athletes such as Kenya’s double Olympic marathon champion, Eliud Kipchoge, practice “peaking and tapering,” in which they increase the intensity of their workouts in the run-up to a major event, then gradually reduce it for a few days or weeks before it. Counter-intuitively, not training right up to the last day can improve performance.
Today’s business leaders need to find a sustainable personal balance. Without a systematic approach to recovery, leaders simply won’t have the mental and spiritual resources they need – or at least not for long. In sports terms, CEOs who sprint all the time risk burnout; and those who prefer a slow but steady marathon pace may miss the chance to outperform their competitors. Thinking in terms of a series of sprints – high-intensity performance with intervals to pause – is the sweet spot. Such leaders are “exothermic” – they give off energy.
The lesson is that rest and recovery, both physical and psychological, contribute to peak performance.
Final thoughts
The parallels between top athletes and business leaders are undeniable. Success in both fields requires strategic focus, relentless learning, data-driven decision-making, resilience in the face of setbacks, and a commitment to recovery.
With the pace of change only accelerating, it is those who adopt high-performance practices who will lead the way. Clearly, in business as in sport, top performance is not achieved by working harder, but by working smarter, while retaining stamina for long-term success.
