Leadership Skills in Sports

Many athletes can tell you the leadership skills they gained from sports. Employers often echo their sentiments.
For example, athletes recognize the importance of teamwork and trust, their skills to affect adversity and conflict, and that the skills to think strategically and shift course when necessary.

In the workplace, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that athletes have skills that are useful in their careers. Most of this wisdom is anecdotal, but some academic research has delved into the ways athletes learn to be leaders with more research on the horizon aimed toward this subject.

One study published in Human Kinetics in 2017 checked out how athletic-participation and other factors affect students’ leadership skills. Student-athletes scored significantly above non-athletes in overall transformational leadership, particularly in two indicators of transformational leadership: management of self (including attitudes toward oneself and consideration for others’ well-being) and management of feelings (including motivating coworkers to elicit feelings of competence and meaning from their work).

“Participation in a sport built confidence and character in high-pressure situations. Student-athletes needed to manage change and failure on a competitive basis. They needed to encourage and influence team members to pursue team goals instead of individual praises,” the study authors wrote. “Relatively, non-student-athletes have less of a chance to place these concepts to practice in real-life scenarios.”

Raghav Saxena

Birla School, Pilani