I have always been interested in sport and while I believe there is something to learn from all experiences, I feel there is a lot that sports teaches that is applicable to management. I always look at CVs to see whether there is any sports in the candidate’s history. Plato figured this out long ago when he said, “ You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
Sport has a way of distilling truths that no management course can teach. It compresses ambition, teamwork, ego, pressure and resilience into the duration of play. It reveals character in real time, showing how people respond when they win, when they lose and when they have to keep going despite both.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that sport is leadership in motion and that its lessons for management are significant.
In individual sports — tennis, golf, running — there’s nowhere to hide. You are simultaneously the strategist, executor and critic. Every decision has an immediate consequence. The scoreboard doesn’t care about intent; it measures only outcome.
For leaders, that mirrors the journey of self-management. You learn accountability. You learn that excuses don’t help and that success comes from consistent preparation, not occasional brilliance or intent. You discover the art of emotional regulation: how to stay calm after an error, how to start again after losing. It’s a life skill.
Team sports, in contrast, are a masterclass in interdependence. You realize quickly that talent without chemistry is noise. The best teams aren’t the ones with the brightest stars, but the ones where everyone knows their role and trusts each other and the system. In management, this translates into two ideas: clarity and culture. Clarity, because people perform best when they understand what’s expected of them. Culture, because shared purpose is what turns cooperation into cohesion.
Whether individual or team-based, every athlete understands the value of practice. The repetitions nobody sees. The corrections nobody applauds. It’s a powerful metaphor for organizational excellence. The best managers— like the best athletes — separate themselves in the invisible hours. They iterate, reflect and improve, often when the world isn’t watching.
Sport also normalizes failure. You win some, you lose some but you always review to learn. In management, that habit of learning from losses without personalizing them is pure gold.
At its best, sport is not just about performance but about flow. The moment when effort becomes effortless and the team moves as one. That’s what great organizations strive for too — a state where purpose, people and performance align.
In the end, sport reminds us that leadership isn’t a title — it’s a practice. You train for it every day. You fail, recover and play again. And, just like in sport, the real victory is not in winning every game, but in building a team, and a self, that keeps getting better.
