3 Reasons Why We Train Leaders the Way We Train High Performance Athletes

By Debbie Muir -

I come from the world of high-performance sport; Olympic and World Championship level. One of the many things I learned over my 27-year coaching career was that building a strong foundation or base of specific skills over time is paramount to performance and ultimately achieving the highest level of success; Olympic Gold. 

And, most important, there are no short-cuts to building and maintaining this foundation. It takes years, and it doesn’t end until the day an athlete retires from their sport. You wouldn’t see a reigning Olympic Champion stop their training if they are going for a repeat performance at the next games. No, they go back to their training ground and practice to be even better today than they were yesterday. 

So, it dawned on me as I go into my 2nd decade of training leaders for high performance, that we had it all wrong. You don't become a World-Class leader by going to a 3-day workshop or listening to someone talk about their journey to success or go take a University course on the various theories of leadership, or read the latest best-selling book.

Don't get me wrong, you can get all kinds of valuable insights & ideas from all of this. I myself am constantly seeking out all these things. I can't tell you how many great ideas I found from reading books & talking to experts in all different fields. But if you don’t consistently act upon each learning, it goes nowhere. Just stays in your head as a nice thought or a good idea with no hope of really improving your performance as a leader.

All this leads to the philosophy behind the Corporate Champions Program. In a nutshell it is: ‘Train leaders the way you train high-performance athletes.’

Here are the 3 key reasons why this works:

1. The High-Performance Pathway 

In sport we have what is called the "Athlete Development Pathway" that incrementally and progressively ensures an athlete builds a strong foundation upon which they can perform at the highest levels. At its simplest, learning a sport involves the teaching, practicing, and perfecting of a series of skills that build upon each other. Ultimately, leading to well trained, high performing athletes ready to take on the world. 

In the Corporate Champions Program we've taken this exact same approach and developed what we call a "High Performance Leadership Pathway". Because leadership is in the doing (it’s a verb) and leadership skills can be taught and practiced, you can see how logical it is to take the leap from ‘Train like a World-Class Athlete’ to ‘Train like a World-Class Leader’. 

In designing this pathway, our biggest challenge was to make sure we had the right traits and accompanying skills to build our framework with. After a decade of testing them out, we now have an extraordinarily strong pathway that incorporates 24 traits each with 3 actions or skills to learn and apply. That’s a pathway of 72 essential elements to train. This may seem somewhat overwhelming, but it really isn’t when you do it incrementally over-time, they start to build and create synergy with each other ultimately creating a sustainable, world-class leadership practice. 

2. You have a Training Venue - Your Workplace

All athletes have a specific venue to train depending on their sport. Swimmers go to the pool, runners to the track, basketball players to the gym. This is where they practice - day in and day out. You don’t see an athlete read a book about their sport and then be able to do it at a high level. Yes, the knowledge and understanding is helpful but until you actually put it all to sustained practice over time, it is merely interesting information.

We replicate this model in the Corporate Champions Program by making the training ground YOUR WORKPLACE. In study after study, the weak point in many leadership development programs is that they are not directly applied in the work environment. There is limited follow through and rarely long-term sustainability. Applying and working through the pathway in your unique situation brings huge value to this program. Each participant essentially gets an individualized training prescription. It’s applied daily, in real-time, in whatever environment you are in. You learn, practice, and observe the impact of each trait as you work through the assignments over the 12 weeks of the program. 

3. On-going Assessment and Improvement

In sport it is easy to measure how well you are doing. There are specific results at competitions, as well as easy to gauge improvements in daily training. Things like measuring if they are swimming faster or jumping higher as specific examples. This on-going evaluation gives a coach and athlete information about where the gaps are, so they can implement better, more effective training and practice regimes depending on what their analysis tells them. The better they do this, the more likely it is that the athlete or team wins. And, even after they have won, they have something to come back to and do it all over again.  

It can be the same way in leadership training and performance. We find that through self-reflection and our assessments, the traits and skills start to become valuable in doing effective gap analyses. On a micro level, as you apply a single skill and reflect on how well you executed, you gain important information around what you are doing well and what needs to be improved. 

At the macro level when all the traits and skills have been integrated into your leadership practice, you can use them as a true gap analysis. They will help you identify where you are and why in any given situation. Then they will guide you in determining what course of action needs to be taken to get the results you want. And, just like in sport, you will continually come back to this as you build, strengthen and continually improve your world-class leadership practice.

When you train leaders the way you train Olympic and World Champions you should expect some great results. We’ve certainly found that to be the case. If you want to learn more check out our program here.

Debbie Muir is co-founder of Great Traits, a company known for its APPLIED High-Performance Leadership training programs.