Sports Leadership: Winning with Your Mind

Sports leadership on the field conjures up all sorts of expectations—with the main one being success. When a sporting team loses a game, you may hear coaches say: “We did not have the mental ability to win”, “There was no team unity and nobody stood up to lead”, or “There just seemed to be a lack of leadership accountability”.

When you ask a coach to explain their comments about leadership, you get all sorts of answers—mainly from the technical aspects of the sport.

Sports leadership intelligence is still in its infancy and while leadership behavior is well advanced in business in the private and public arena, a lot more work is required to develop the correlation between leadership behavior (on-field) and improved sporting performance.