Navio Kwok, PhD, is a leadership adviser, specializing in organizational psychology, at leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates.
During Meg Whitman’s tenure at the helm of online auction giant eBay, she grew the company from 30 employees with $4.7-million in annual revenue to a global public enterprise of 15,000 employees with nearly $8-billion in annual revenue. In 2010, Harvard Business Review named her the eighth best-performing chief executive officer and top female CEO of the decade.
Reflecting on that experience in her book, The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life, Ms. Whitman writes, “I gravitated to playing sports with my siblings and on any team I could join. And I consider that opportunity critical to my eventual success in business.”
Other prominent leaders have also participated in sports. Former IBM president, CEO and chair Samuel Palmisano played football in high school and at Johns Hopkins University. Former Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb was the captain of the soccer team at Stanford University. And current chair of Deloitte U.S. Lara Abrash still plays competitive softball.
A recent study of more than 400,000 Ivy League graduates over the past half century suggests that these sporting anecdotes may be the rule rather than the exception. Compared to non-athletes, athletes earn higher wages over their careers and attain more senior organizational positions.
But what is it about pursuits in sports that make athletes good employees?
Looking at the psychological research, anecdotes and what I see around me, it is clear that sports expose kids to immaterial but impactful consequences early in life, which helps them develop both the belief that they can handle difficult circumstances and the necessary discipline to persevere in the working world – provided they have proper support.
What follows is evidence that with good coaching, athletic experiences are formative experiences that shape resilience, confidence and perseverance among adolescents, and advice for parents.
1. Sports have immaterial but impactful consequences
Sports are synonymous with pressure, from performing at practices and on game days to receiving feedback during post-game debriefs and from sideline critics. Yet, most sporting consequences are artificial – in the sense that losing or underperforming doesn’t result in serious harm – though they are undeniably visceral.
A benefit, however, is that repeated exposure to the right amount of stress builds resilience and improves our ability to handle future stress. Children who participate in sports report lower stress and are better able to regulate their emotions, an ability that predicts whether they have formal leadership responsibilities in early adulthood.
2. Athletes believe they can handle difficult circumstances
Through successive and successful attempts at overcoming adversity, athletes develop the belief that they can handle future difficult situations. Though this process also occurs organically during sport participation, it is a conscious choice at the upper echelons of competitive sports. Compared to elite athletes, super-elite athletes who have won multiple medals at major championships actively seek out anxiety-inducing situations.
An aggregate of the most-recent research revealed that children’s participation in sports positively affects their sense of self-worth and self-efficacy. The self-efficacy beliefs that individuals have about their capabilities not only predict their satisfaction but also performance at work.
3. Athletes have the discipline to persevere
Motivation is a momentary, feel-good spark that inspires us to do something, but feelings are fleeting and inevitably fizzle over time. Discipline, however, is the persistent effort that we put in to progress toward our goals regardless of how we feel, and is what transforms fantasy into reality.
A multi-year study of adolescents found that compared to those who did not participate in sports or those who discontinued participation during the study, those who regularly played sports had greater improvements in their ability to persevere through challenging conditions. Developing such perseverance is important because it is discipline, not motivation, that predicts achievement and success.
4. Athletes receive coaching
Adversity builds resilience but only with the appropriate resources, one of which comes from coaching. Athletes who have strong relationships with their coach have a healthier sense of self and receive better coaching. Markers of such coaching include encouraging athletes to do hard work with maximum effort, to persist in the face of setbacks, to support others and to focus on self-improvement rather than other-comparisons.
Ultimately, good coaches not only teach their sport, but also help athletes find meaning in the mundane and crystallize the symbolic lessons experienced through sport participation. In that regard, coaches commonly say, “How you do anything is how you do everything,” which is why the exposure, beliefs and discipline developed through sports translate into workplace success.
Advice for parents
For parents, the advice isn’t simply to enroll your children in sports at a young age, though it is beneficial and recommended, since less than one in two adolescents participate in any kind of sport and even fewer do as they transition out of high school.
One of the biggest tensions that parents must navigate is between providing a comfortable life for their children while also ensuring that they have the capacity to overcome adversity, which doesn’t come from an easy life. Although best practice might be to enroll all children in sports, the best principle is to expose them to personally meaningful but challenging experiences and to support them through that process. Sport is one – but not the only – means to this end.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.