What lessons can business leaders learn from sport?
A good business leader recognises that they can always improve their skills and learn new lessons. Investing in continued training is one way to do that, but you should also draw on life experience and always treat every experience as an opportunity to grow and become a better business owner.
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Sport is a prime example of this but we don’t often think about the relationship between playing sports and running a business. However, there are actually a lot of important things you can learn about the business world from sports. These are some of the big lessons that all business leaders can learn from playing sports.
You’re nothing without your team
Imagine trying to play a game of football with 11 players on one side and you on your own on the other side. Even if you are a world-class footballer playing against a local pub team, you’re still going to struggle. The business world is the same and no matter how good you are in your specific area, you can’t do everything on your own. You rely on your team and it’s only when you all pull together and work as a well organised unit that you will see results.
Every goal takes hard work
Whenever you try to score a goal in any sport, the opposing team is there to stop you. It’s never easy to score, every goal takes hard work. This is something that business leader and hockey player Wayne Blazejczyk tries to instil in his students in every match they play. It’s a great life lesson and it’s a very important lesson for business leaders to learn too. Running a business is always going to be hard and if you want to get anywhere, you need to put the work in. Most importantly, you can’t give up with every setback. A game of football wouldn’t last long if the players walked off the pitch the first time they got tackled or missed a shot.
Strategy is key to success
A professional sports team doesn’t just walk out onto the pitch and hope for the best. They have strategies that have been carefully formulated and practised before the match, based on the play style of their opponents and their own relative strengths. Without that strategy, they don’t stand much chance of success, and a business is just the same. It’s not enough to just say that you’re going to make more sales. How are you going to do that? Will you target a different market segment or focus on getting repeat customers? Are you going to adjust your marketing campaign? You also need a plan for securing your business and managing financial difficulties, in much the same way that sports teams will have backup strategies to counteract their opponent’s strategies. If you are taking things day by day and you don’t have a plan of action in place, your business is likely to fail.
You might not think that sports can teach you much about business, but many of the lessons you learn will help you be a better business owner.
