What can top managers learn from Sports?

Posted by Carlo Marques on 23 Mar, 2018 10:27 am

Can one compare the stress of managing a company to the pressure of competing with the best from all over the world at the Olympics? The Magazine looks at what top managers can learn with high-performance athletes and points out similarities between these two activities.

The Magazine-Review about the Importance of Sports into Management

A high-performance athlete is usually under a lot of stress, being tested daily and having to compete with the best from all over the world. Skills such as resilience, team-work, and stress management are essential as any psychological break during a competition can result in an underperformance, a defeat or even a physical injury. These same competencies could be useful to top managers competing on a very unstable business scenario with top global companies. In fact, although sports and management may seem worlds apart, the truth is there are many common aspects between these two realities.

Pedro Oliveira, CEO at BP Portugal, used to be a professional Judo player until an injury drove him away from high-performance competitions. Since then, he decided to focus on business and management, although he still practices Judo as well as other sports. In fact, he was already CEO at BP Portugal when he won the bronze medal on the Veterans World Championships, in 2014. From his experience, Pedro highlights how much he learned in the various human dimensions, such as self-knowledge and how he reacts under stress, team work and the ability to anticipate competitors’ moves.

One of the key aspects, highlighted by the BP executive is the “huge respect for the team, as it is only through team-work that results are born”: “We don’t get to evolve in Judo unless we have several people that train with us daily. These people sacrifice themselves, knowing that only a few of us will be able to achieve the final goals, but the victory will be shared with the whole team”.

“effective teams want to overachieve all the time. They aren’t just good, they’re excellent”

Tatiana Ferreira, Sports Psychologist, works with High-Performance Athletes to help them maximize their performance by managing their motivation and keeping the focus. Regarding the importance of the team, she highlights: “effective teams want to overachieve all the time. They aren’t just good, they’re excellent.” To achieve this, some factors are essential such as assertive communication and goal-definition: “A coach or a manager have to know what their goals are: increase sales, win the tournament… However, the whole team needs to share these same objectives and understand their importance. (…) People must understand they are responsible for themselves, but also for the group. Ideally, there would be a match between the team’s and individual goals. These way, when athletes find out that the coach is working for the team’s interest for also for each athlete’s personal interest, they will be more engaged and motivated as they have a personal commitment with the team.”

Dealing with the unpredicted

Even with the most motivated and effective teams, things can still end up differently than the way we expected. That is why Tatiana Ferreira explains that “athletes ought to have a Plan B to be able to deal with unexpected situations. Before any competition, they have to anticipate their precise actions and thoughts but they also need to come up with a plan B of action in case anything goes wrong.”

Telma Monteiro, Judo athlete and Olympic medal winner stresses: “Even when things go wrong, we have to focus on what we can control. Sometimes people are unable to act during a panic situation, but I try to focus on the solution and not on the problem. We must be aware that, even when we do everything right, we may not have the expected results. However, this is not the end of the line, because there are many alternative goals and solutions.”

According to Pedro Oliveira, sports “helps us face these very volatile and uncertain times (…) it shapes our mind, so we can take pleasure or even look for more challenging situations, because we take pleasure in great victories by the fact that they weren’t really expected.”

Stress Management

By making people focusing on what they can control and helping them face uncertainty, sports can also teach us a thing or two about stress management. Can you imagine having to control your nerves during a world tournament where you’d have to jump over 14 meters? Susana Costa, triple jump athlete, is familiar with this feeling. She says she avoids being anxious by being around people that make her feel good: “I try not to focus too much on the competition, because that’s something that I have to do before that, during training. Training is not just what I do during the exercise, it’s also the mental preparation. Is picturing all the sensations and technical gestures that I need to do to make the best jump. Sometimes, I go home thinking about how I can do a specific gesture and that too is part of my preparation.”

Pedro Oliveira thinks that the origin of stress is very much the same in management and sports: “the pressure to have results and the fear of not being able to deliver them, to meet other people’s expectations as well as our own.” According to him: “Sports teaches us how to deal with this pressure. That there is a very fine line between failing and succeeding and we just must do everything in our power to maximize our odds. If we work on everything that we control and respect what we don’t, we will live this ‘affair’ with stress with actual pleasure.”

Other way to deal with stress is to have a balance of high and low activation moments, pointed out Tatiana Ferreira: “When they are competing, athletes have to have high activation emotions. However, if people are always with a high activation (wetter this is associated with positive or negative emotions), they will also need to have low activation moments in order to recover. Everybody needs to have recovery strategies, we just need to understand which activities work best with us – working out, hang out with friends, reading… – and make this a habit. Otherwise, if we are unable to disconnect and recover, generally speaking (as other factors may have influence) this may result in a burnout or depression.”

Sports and Business are different realities, sure, but they’re intimately linked with each other. A good manager has skills in common with any good athlete and this can be seen in the way as the manager deals with unpredicted issues and stressful situations. What’s important to retain? A good manager and an athlete are quite similar not only in the way they deal with stressful situations but in leadership skills. This makes them special in their approach to any problem either a technical one or interpersonal challenge.

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