Whether you’re a sports fan or not, it’s long been acknowledged that sports is an excellent way to learn, grow and gain important life lessons. There are many leadership lessons one can learn from sports. As kids in little league baseball or soccer, they learn how to share, how to pass the ball and the importance of being a good winner and a loser. But looking to sports is also ideal for becoming better leaders and managers.
Great sports teams are led by inspirational coaches who help players develop and motivate teams to achieve things they might not have thought possible.
Leadership lessons from sports
Lets look at the five essential life lessons you can learn life lessons learned from sports
Desire to excel
One of the sports life lessons to learns is to be obsessed with improving: The only way teams get better is through continuous practice. If a team doesn’t train and seek new ways to better their opponent and improve their own game, they risk stagnating and falling behind. Leaders need to do the same with themselves and with their teams. There should be a culture of continuous improvement, growth and learning, one that comes up with new ‘plays’ regularly and reviews how old ones are working.
Accepting challenges
Accept what you can’t control and focus on what you can change: As much as a team practices and trains and creates plays for each scenario, there’s only so much you can control in an actual game. Just like sports teams, leaders need to focus on what they can control and not worry about things they can’t change. That only creates stress and tension, which fuels an anxious culture in which to work.
Strategic planning
Another leadership lessons from sports is breaking down the plan into manageable parts: Every play in sports requires planning and strategy, but plays can be complex and take time to memorize. In sports, coaches break down plays into small chunks so the whole team can see it. Leaders need to do the same with projects and strategic goal settings. Abstract ideas are hard to execute and so are projects that seem too large to deal with. By breaking down a project and going ‘play by play’, people have time to digest things, they can see where they fit into the overall picture and can ask questions on issues they don’t fully understand.
Accepting wins and losses
Lessons learned from sports also includes dealing with success and failure. Few things in life have stark successes and failure like sports do. Teams or individuals either win or lose, but what is crucial is how they win and lose. Leaders should do the same with their companies, first by encouraging people to win and lose. Healthy competition is always good but more importantly, by emphasizing that successes and failures at work will met with respect from all sides. They can also use company wins and losses to dissect what went wrong and look at what can go better.
Communication and teamwork
Another lesson leaders can learn from sports is communication and teamwork, as they are key to success: Sports teams cannot succeed without incredible teamwork and communication. If everyone on the team either does not understand the play or isn’t participating in it, it could have detrimental effects for the success of the game. Leaders have to focus on communication and teamwork if they want their company to succeed. They must make sure not only that people are communicating, but that people understand each other and understand the various forms of communication.
