They played sports.
Brian Moynihan led Bank of America through the 2008 financial crisis. Before that? He was co-captain of the Brown University rugby team.
Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft’s culture and performance. Before that? He played cricket at Hyderabad.
Meg Whitman ran eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Before that? Multi-sport high school athlete. Squash and lacrosse competitor at Princeton.
This is not a coincidence.
Playing sports builds leadership capacity and self-confidence in measurable ways [
Cornell University].
The correlation between athletic experience and executive achievement is one of the most consistent findings across decades of leadership research. Most people stop there and miss the point.
It’s not just teamwork, or resilience, or pressure. It’s
training.
Here’s what Brian Moynihan said about rugby:
Team sports requires you to be in a group setting, requires you to accommodate, requires you to lead, requires you to step back when somebody can actually do something better than you...all that is very important for business.
He credits those lessons with shaping how he leads, guiding Bank of America through challenge, complexity, and recovery.
In his book Hit Refresh, Satya Nadella reflects on a lesson from cricket: a captain once trusted him to bowl in a key moment instead of taking over himself. That moment shaped how he led - building empathy, trust, and a culture where others can step up and succeed.
The difference: the training system
Athletes:
- Practice under pressure before it matters
- Get real feedback (not sugar-coated)
- Treat failure as data
- Build habits through repetition
That is the thing business schools and corporate training programs almost never replicate.
When Satya Nadella took over at Microsoft, he brought in Dr. Michael Gervais, a sport psychologist, to train leaders like athletes [
PubMed Central].
Most organizations do not do this.
- Engagement just dropped to 20% globally, with an estimated cost of $10 trillion in lost productivity [State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report]
- 70% of engagement depends on the manager [Gallup]
- 45% of managers say their company isn’t doing enough to develop future leaders [TalentLMS]
- Only 12% of managers think the leaders in their company are well-rounded and effective [TalentLMS]
Most organizations care about development. They are just using the wrong model and lacking effective systems.
Not events. Not seminars. Not a library of content so large nobody knows where to start.
Structured practice. Consistent reps. Real feedback. Week after week. Until the skill becomes the default behavior, not the thing you remember from the off-site last October.
According to the 70-20-10 rule (derived from 30-years of research at the
Center for Creative Leadership), leaders learn and grow from 3 types of experience, following a ratio of:
- 70% challenging experiences and assignments
- 20% developmental relationships (coaches and mentors)
- 10% coursework and training
Coursework sets the stage, practice actually builds the skill.
Managers are often promoted with no playbook, no coach, no practice system. In fact, 60% of new managers fail within the first 24 months, largely due to a lack of training in leadership and management skills [
Wharton].
Moynihan had a coach. Nadella had a coach. Whitman had multiple coaches.
The best leaders and managers have a coach.
That is what STEER Lab is built around: Not a one-time event. A practice field. Where leaders build real skills, get real feedback, and show up differently for their teams every single week.
Ready for a coach? Let's talk!
