Sporting chance

As a boy, sport was not my thing. I tried for the school swimming team but an inability to swim in a straight line put paid to my aquatic ambitions. That and the fact that I had a tendency to sink like a stone after half a dozen strokes. I played Australian Rules football for the local suburban club for a few years but the only goal I ever scored during my three years with the Maidstone Under 13s was for the other side. On prize nights I secretly yearned to at least scrape in for a Best Trier or Most Improved award but those distinctions were beyond me as well.

I have been reminded of my lack of sporting prowess by the growing trend to link success on the sporting field with corporate success.

It’s not new for retired sporting heroes to make a living as motivational speakers but in recent years I have become aware of a number of books, leadership and team-building programs and moves by sportsmen and women into consulting, executive coaching and mentoring.

So, is it true that business leaders – and aspiring business leaders – can learn valuable lessons from sports coaches and athletes? It’s an interesting question. In my case, as a below-average child athlete, sports coaches were unable to impart any valuable lessons. Today I feel on much safer ground writing about coaches and athletes seeking to inspire business leaders to new heights – and I don’t even have to raise a sweat.

When I was a child following Aussie Rules, footballers weren’t “professional”, they were just very good at playing football. Nobody talked about them being role models; they were simply our heroes. And they were definitely not hobnobbing with chief executives and corporate luminaries, let alone advising them; most of them were working as plumbers and boilermakers and rarely mixed in rarefied corporate circles.

Not so today. Former rugby league champion and inaugural squad member of Melbourne Storm Scott Hill and his business partner, former head physiotherapist with the South African national football (soccer) team David Becker, set up Sports Wisdom “with the aim of inspiring individual excellence by sharing the success secrets from sport”. (No, I had to check, too: Posh Spice’s husband is David Beckham.)

“Sport can provide the cutting edge required to succeed in today’s competitive world,” Hill says. “Competing in sports provides life lessons that transfer into the boardroom and the executive office. Sport teaches skills that are critical to success in the business world, including competing to win, overcoming adversity, taking risks, playing with passion and working with a team.”

Where was Hill and his wisdom when I was toiling away with the Maidstone Under 13s? Not yet born actually, so I best move on.

Hill and Becker are also the co-authors of the book Secrets of Winning Coaches Revealed, a compilation of interviews with 12 coaching greats, including Ron Barassi, Wayne Bennett and Ric Charlesworth.

I’m relying on the publicity blurb here but the book provides readers with the coaches’ insights on getting the best out of an individual or a team, how to create environments for success and how to nurture relationships of real influence.

The authors distil “seven key characteristics” from their interviews with the “master coaches”. They are: ambition, work ethic, discipline, confidence, attitude, persistence and resilience. The authors posit that these attributes of elite athletes mirror the attributes of successful business leaders.

“The wisdom they share has the capacity to shape the way the business world can learn from the sports arena to support and improve the performance of its employees,“ Hill says. “The lessons we learn from sport teach us about life, about competition and can easily be applied to the business environment.”

I haven’t read the book. What interests me is not, in this instance, the contents of the book but the question of what constitutes leadership. This has always been an intriguing question.

The quest to understand the core elements of leadership and success has been a staple of business and management books for decades. But as the challenges of leadership become more complex and demanding, there is a heightened need to understand the attributes, characteristics and qualities that define successful leadership

Strictly speaking, if elite sporting coaches and athletes have a contribution to make to this quest, perhaps a range of other successful people with no discernable link to business also have a contribution to make? Why not the insights of a successful musical conductor, school principal or Melbourne Cup jockey? They would be no strangers to the seven attributes.

In my view, there is no secret formula to successful leadership. But there are secret elements. Some of these are personal qualities that are unique, innate and beyond replication.

But it’s also true that the experiences and insights of successful people can inspire us; they can induce us to rethink attitudes or consider a different way of approaching a task or challenge; they can reveal techniques and strategies that we have never previously thought about; they can motivate us to have another go; and they can entertain.

Whether a premiership football coach or Oscar-winning movie director – everyone has something to contribute to the eternal question of what makes a successful leader. What we get out of their insights is mostly up to us.

As for me, the story of how I kicked a goal for the other side will have to wait for another time.

Do you agree? Write and tell me your views.

BRW

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