The Coaching Playbook: What Sports Taught Me About Leadership

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a sports broadcaster. I grew up in Nova Scotia playing a lot of sports, although there were always plenty of people who were better at them than I was. But that didn’t matter. I loved sports. I wanted to be around them and part of that world.

As I watched sports growing up, I became fascinated by the people who got to tell the stories. Whether it was before the game, at halftime, or in the middle of the action, someone had the job of helping the audience understand what was happening. I knew I wanted to be that person.

I was fortunate enough to turn that childhood interest into a career. I spent 20 years working for national sports networks, travelling the world, covering some of the biggest sporting events on the planet, and spending a lot of time around elite athletes, coaches and teams. I also got a front-row seat to leadership through the lens of the sporting world.

When you spend that much time around professional sports, you see what goes into winning and what happens when teams fall short. You see how coaches build relationships, how teams respond under pressure, and how the best performers prepare for moments that, to everyone watching, can look effortless.

I've come to notice a lot of parallels between the locker room and the boardroom. In both environments, we tend to notice leadership most in the big moments: The important presentation, the difficult conversation, the speech before the game. But those moments rarely tell the whole story. Leadership has to be an everyday thing.

The Big Speech is Only a Small Part of Leadership

Pop culture gives us a very particular image of what a great coach looks like. The team is down, everyone gathers in the locker room, the coach delivers an incredible speech, and suddenly everyone is ready to run through a wall.

Sure, those moments can happen. But nobody buys into a rah-rah speech simply because you found the right words.

A professional baseball team can be together from the middle of February until the end of October. Players and coaches may spend more time with one another than they do with their own families. They're together through wins, losses, injuries, slumps, travel, personal challenges, and everything else that happens over the course of a season.

Trust is built during all of that.

A coach can have every piece of performance data available. They can know exactly what the numbers say a player should be doing. But leadership requires knowing more than the numbers.

Maybe a player's shoulder has been bothering them. Maybe someone at home isn't doing well. Maybe they haven't been sleeping. A coach who has built a relationship with that person can have a very different conversation. Then, when the moment comes that a leader needs their team to believe in what they’re asking of them, those earlier interactions matter.

Consistency Builds Trust

This connects closely to something we talk about at The Humphrey Group: Mindset.

When I facilitate leadership programs, I often begin by asking people what makes someone a leader. What I find interesting is that people usually give me traits, not titles. They talk about things like trust, confidence, integrity, empathy, and communication.

In other words, leadership isn't something that suddenly switches on because you have a certain title or because an important moment has arrived. Around locker rooms, you'll often hear that the best leaders are the same person every day, and I think that matters in any workplace.

People shouldn't have to come into work wondering which version of their leader they're going to get. Can I bring this problem to them today, or are they going to be in a bad mood? Can I ask a question? Is this a good day to disagree?

You don't build that trust on the day you suddenly need it. Consistency in how you treat people creates stability. Over time, people learn whether they can trust you, whether you mean what you say, and whether it's safe to come to you when something isn't going well.

Know Your People

The other lesson I've taken from great coaches is that leadership can't be one-size-fits-all.

Think about a pitching coach working with 13 different pitchers. Each has their own routine and way of preparing. One pitcher might be reviewing video, another training in the gym, while someone else is out on the field warming up. You still need everyone aligned, but sending the same message to all 13 people isn't necessarily going to get you there.

You have to know your people. That's also why I connect so strongly with Audience-Centeredness at The Humphrey Group. Effective communication requires us to think beyond what we want to say and consider the people we're actually trying to reach.

Broadcasting taught me that lesson long before I had a name for it. If I was covering the Blue Jays on a Sunday afternoon, I knew I might be speaking to a huge audience ranging from young kids to lifelong baseball fans. Some people watch every pitch closely. Others have the game on while making lunch and folding laundry.

That means finding a way to speak to all of them. I need to offer enough insight that the lifelong fan gets something from the broadcast, without assuming so much knowledge that I lose the person who only tunes in occasionally. I have to think about what the audience already knows, what they need from me, and what will keep them connected to the story I'm telling.

Covering tennis for a highly engaged audience in the middle of a major tournament might require something completely different. The audience changes, what they know changes, and what they need from you changes.

Leadership communication works the same way. Knowing what you want to say is only part of the work. You have to understand who is receiving it, what matters to them, and what they need from you in that moment. A good coach understands that different players may need different things. A good leader does, too.

Preparation Makes Performance Possible

I learned a version of this lesson through broadcasting too. When you see someone standing courtside for 60 or 90 seconds before a match, it can look spontaneous. What you don't see is everything that happened before the camera turned on.

Before a tennis tournament, I might sit down with a dozen players for interviews. I'd watch practices and talk to coaches. I'd pay attention to small details. Maybe a player spends an unusual amount of a practice returning serves from one particular side of the court. Why? What does their opponent do? What might that tell me about the match we're about to see?

All of that information has to be gathered, considered, and synthesized so that when I have 90 seconds to speak, I can tell the audience something useful.

The same principle applies to leadership. The important meeting isn't the time to begin thinking about what you believe. The difficult conversation isn't the time to start building a relationship with the person across from you.

The moment when your team is under pressure isn't the time to begin establishing trust. Performance is what people see. Preparation is what makes it possible.

Excellence Is Delivering When It Matters

We sometimes talk about high performance as though it means working constantly: longer hours, more effort, always pushing. That's not how I think about excellence.

Excellence is being prepared. It's thinking through scenarios. It's knowing your people and understanding what they might need from you. And when the moment arrives, it's being able to deliver.

That's what I've seen from some of the best athletes and teams in the world, and it's what I continue to see in great leaders.

The locker room and the boardroom may look very different, but it's remarkable just how similar the heartbeat of each is. People are still people. They want to know where they stand. They want to know their work matters. They want leaders who understand them, communicate clearly, and can be trusted when things become difficult.

That kind of leadership capability is built in the conversations, decisions, preparation, and relationships that happen every day. By the time the big moment comes, the real work of leadership has already been done.

 

Great leadership is built every day.

From everyday conversations to high-stakes moments, the way you communicate shapes how others experience your leadership. Discover how Speaking as a Leader® helps leaders communicate with clarity, confidence, and purpose.