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High-performance leadership is often associated with discipline, resilience and execution under pressure — but EY-Parthenon research suggests the strongest leaders also need adaptability, recovery and empathy. Sports has long been seen as a training ground for executive leadership. By comparing CxOs with and without a background in sports, EY-Parthenon teams were able to uncover not only the leadership strengths of discipline, role clarity and feedback, but also rigidity, blind spots and difficulty with long-term planning. The research suggests its greatest contribution to business is not only just competitiveness; but an operating system for building resilient, adaptable high-performing teams.
The latest signals from the EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook: High-Performance Leadership survey suggest that the relationship between a sport-oriented mindset and business leadership is more nuanced than the familiar comparison implies. The question is not whether C-suite leaders should become more like athletes. It is whether they can apply the strengths of a sporting mindset without inheriting its limitations.
Leaders with a sports background appear more likely to mobilize teams, use real-time data, favor formal scenario planning and pursue strategic advantage through disciplined, incremental improvement. However, they also show clear pressure points around speed, long-term trade-offs, deliberate recovery and communication under emotional strain.
In today’s nonlinear, accelerating, volatile and interconnected (“NAVI”) environment, sustained performance is not created by discipline alone. Nor is it created by adaptability alone. The highest-performing leadership teams combine both skill sets: they are disciplined enough to execute consistently and flexible enough to adapt when conditions demand it. In this edition:
The survey shows that leaders with sports backgrounds are more inclined toward consistent, disciplined performance: small, repeatable gains and widespread but incremental improvements. By contrast, leaders without a sports background lean more toward experimentation and rapid adaptation.
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Read moreThe findings suggest that a sports mindset may be less about individual brilliance and more about an operating system: establishing routines, clarifying roles, measuring progress and improving continuously. In business terms, this reflects the logic of marginal gains, where performance and competitive advantage are built through consistency rather than comprehensive transformation initiatives.
“When you have routines that tell your brain to almost automate it, and that frees up cognitive space for dealing with the unknowns. It’s the same for athletes and in business, even the military would argue the same thing: if we have our routines strictly in place, that teaches us how many balls we can have up in the air at any one time and what I can scale up and down,” says Stephen Seiler, Professor in Sports Science at the University of Agder in Norway. “For any high-performance pursuit, you need those good routines to free up that space and make it possible to take a breath when trauma, or the unexpected hits.”
Sport provides clarity for each individual’s role in the collective effort. “In a sports organization or on a team, the results are very clear and very visible,” says Elliot Schwartz, Performance Innovation Lead, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. “It’s really easy for athletes to understand how they contribute to this team’s results. But in a corporate environment, especially in a large company, it’s much harder to see that. People want to know how their small piece of the project really impacts the company’s bottom line. Corporates can learn from sports here.”
However, the same discipline a sports background nurtures can also create rigidity. Leaders without a sports background are much more likely to recognize the risks of over-planning: 55% believe it creates a false sense of control (compared with 30% of sports leaders), while 66% believe detailed planning can reduce adaptability (compared with 52%).
The leadership implication is clear: discipline should create the confidence to act, not the rigidity to resist change. The strongest organizations will use routines and performance systems to raise the floor of execution, while still preserving the flexibility to shift when the external environment changes.
Sports leaders' approach to preparation is more nuanced than it first appears. Forty-seven percent of leaders with a sports background use formal, structured scenario planning for some scenarios, compared with 34% of non-sports leaders. Yet they are less likely to rehearse playbooks for all major critical moments, with 42% saying they do so, compared with 47% of non-sports leaders. The survey indicates that effective preparation is not about having a plan, but creating the confidence, shared language and role clarity needed to respond effectively under pressure.
You’re constantly coached, challenged and expected to execute under pressure. Those experiences naturally shape leaders who understand how to align people around a common goal.
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Read moreThis difference is most evident in crisis response. When a sudden, high-pressure crisis strikes, leaders with sports backgrounds are more likely to bring the team together to assign responsibilities collectively and solve the issue as a group. They are also more likely to delegate responsibility to a dedicated "red team." By contrast, non-sports leaders are almost twice as likely to step back and rely on pre-rehearsed playbooks or scenario frameworks, at 36% vs. 19%.
In fast-moving situations, this distributed thinking can be an advantage. “Elite athletes spend years working within high-performing teams where success depends on trust, clear roles and shared accountability. You’re constantly coached, challenged and expected to execute under pressure. Those experiences naturally shape leaders who understand how to align people around a common goal,” says Joice Maduaka, two-time Olympian and Global Lead of the EY Athlete Programs.
But it also raises a critical question for boards and leadership teams: are you building the capability to adapt under pressure, or just investing in playbooks that only work when events unfold as expected?
A crisis does not create a leadership operating system. It exposes it.
Leaders with sports backgrounds appear more comfortable mobilizing people. They are more likely to say it is easy to maintain team morale in difficult circumstances and less likely to find influencing people and teams challenging.
However, leaders with sports backgrounds also identify key challenges. They are more likely to struggle with balancing short-term demands with long-term strategy, while also finding it difficult to act quickly enough and access reliable data and expertise in real time.
At first glance, this appears counterintuitive. Sport is often associated with speed and decisive action, but those strengths do not always transfer directly to the business world. Leaders with sports backgrounds appear highly effective at mobilizing people under pressure but may find it more challenging when crises demand rapid trade-offs between immediate action, incomplete information and longer-term strategic consequences.
This distinction is reinforced in a high-stakes reputational scenario. When asked how they would respond to a catastrophic public failure caused by flawed data presented to the board, leaders with sports backgrounds are more likely to prioritize visible leadership accountability and organizational stability. By contrast, non-sports leaders are more likely to focus on identifying the operational breakdown to reduce the risk of it happening again.
Neither instinct is sufficient on its own. Effective crisis leadership requires both: the confidence and accountability to stabilize the organization in the moment and the analytical discipline to understand what went wrong and prevent it from happening again.
A similar pattern emerges in decision-making. Leaders with sports backgrounds are more likely to rely on real-time performance data to guide decisions. Non-sports leaders are more likely to cite predictive insights and forward-looking analytics.
Together, these findings suggest that leaders with sports backgrounds naturally optimize for execution in the present, while non-sports leaders are more inclined to anticipate what comes next.
However, the strongest leadership teams combine both perspectives. High performance is not about maximizing strengths but managing the trade-offs those strengths create.
This balance is particularly evident in communication. Leaders with sports backgrounds are more likely to say that simplifying complex situations into clear communication is easy. More broadly, their communication style emphasizes clarity, consistency, confidence and internal alignment.
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Read moreThese qualities are invaluable in high-pressure situations where stakeholders need confidence, teams need alignment and boards need assurance that the organization is responding decisively.
Yet the same communication style can be less effective when difficult conversations require empathy. Here, the contrast is striking. Half of leaders with sports backgrounds (50%) identify delivering bad news compassionately as one of the most challenging aspects of high-visibility communication, compared with 36% of leaders without a sports background.
This should not be interpreted as a lack of accountability. If anything, the survey suggests the opposite: leaders with sports backgrounds are slightly more likely to admit mistakes to both senior leaders and more junior colleagues.
But accountability alone is not enough. In an environment where trust is shaped by transparency, tone and timing, leaders must also be able to communicate difficult news with empathy.
Recovery is another challenge — and one of the most surprising findings in the survey relates to recovery. Elite sport has long recognized that sustained performance depends on deliberate recovery, yet business leaders with sports backgrounds appear less likely to prioritize recovery intentionally.
Only 8% say they deliberately create space for recovery and reflection before fully re-engaging after a period of high pressure, compared with 29% of non-sports leaders. Rather than intentionally recovering, they are more likely to reflect on their performance without significantly changing their routine (33% vs. 24%).
The findings do not suggest that leaders value recovery less. Instead, they appear more inclined to maintain momentum, even after periods of intense pressure. In today's business environment, however, sustained high performance depends on resilience and knowing when to pause, recover and reset.
89% of leaders, regardless of background, agree that rest and reflection are essential to effective leadership. The difference lies not in how much they value recovery, but in how they operationalize it. Leaders with sports backgrounds appear more likely to view recovery as an embedded part of their routine, whereas non-sports leaders appear more intentional about creating dedicated time for reflection.
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Read moreThe conclusion is not that business leaders should become more like athletes. It is that CEOs and boards need to be intentional about the leadership capabilities they cultivate across their executive teams.
The sports mindset contributes discipline, confidence, consistency, role clarity, morale-building and real-time feedback. The non-sports mindset contributes adaptability, empathy, external awareness, strategic foresight and comfort with ambiguity.
The next competitive advantage may come from combining both. Organizations that deliberately integrate these complementary leadership capabilities will be better equipped to navigate uncertainty, sustain performance and create long-term value.
There are clear signs that leaders with sports backgrounds already understand the importance of support systems. Compared with non-sports leaders, they are more likely to have used professional or leadership coaches, mentors, internal development programs, peer networks or informal sounding boards over the past 12 months.
For leaders with sports backgrounds, the next edge may not come from greater discipline, but from using support systems to broaden perspective, challenge assumptions and build the adaptability today's business environment increasingly demands.
“There is a misconception that high-performance athletes are simply more disciplined, more resilient, more committed to their goals than other people. But in reality, athletes have a whole ecosystem of people and support that makes a huge difference to them,” says Julian Nunez Corredor, Founder and CEO of RoloBike Training Systems and Coach Expert at Union Cycliste Internationale.
“At the center is the athlete, but around them you have a head coach orchestrating physiologists, mechanics, nutritionists, physiotherapists and others. The head coach connects all these professionals, making sure the training, the body, the equipment and the recovery are aligned. And it is the communication between these professionals that really makes the difference at high performance levels. When everything goes well, people only see the athlete. But when something goes wrong, that support team is there to say, ‘we are here for you — let’s work it out.’”
For leaders without a sports background, the opportunity is different, but equally clear. Adopt the strengths of sport: clearer roles, stronger routines, better team mobilization and more consistent performance feedback, while preserving the adaptability, empathy and strategic foresight that already distinguish their approach.
The strongest leadership teams are neither purely sports-led nor purely business-led. They combine the strengths of both: disciplined enough to execute, adaptable enough to change, confident enough to lead and reflective enough to keep learning.
As organizations navigate AI, transformation and sustained uncertainty, competitive advantage will depend less on individual leadership excellence and more on whether executive teams combine the complementary capabilities needed to thrive.
The future belongs not to leaders who think alike, but to leadership teams that combine discipline with adaptability, confidence with empathy and execution with foresight.
The strongest leaders do not choose between discipline and adaptability – they cultivate both. Insights from the EY-Parthenon High-Performance Leadership Survey suggest that long-term leadership advantage comes from combining execution, resilience and accountability with empathy, flexibility and strategic foresight.
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