I played on one of the best lacrosse teams in Johns Hopkins history. We were stacked with talent and we did not win the championship.
That loss has stayed with me for thirty years and was the moment that started my journey to understand what actually makes a great team.
For three decades, I’ve chased that answer. As an operator. As an entrepreneur. As a coach. I coached all three of my kids through youth sports and watched them reach the collegiate level. I coached and developed thousands of founders, executives, leaders, and teams across industries and stages of growth.
And the same pattern keeps showing up again and again, regardless of the industry, the market, or the moment: Talent isn’t enough. The most talented team doesn’t always win. The best-trained team does.
And this is exactly where most organizations get it wrong.
Someone excels in their role. They work hard, earn trust, and get promoted into leadership. And the moment they step into that role, everything that made them successful stops being the job.
Now the work is about people. Building a team. Giving feedback. Navigating conflict. Reading the room. Creating a culture where people want to stay and do their best work. No one trained them for it.
Research shows that 60 percent of managers step into leadership roles with no formal training. No transition. No crash course. Nothing.
Organizations hand them a team and say: good luck.
We would never do that to an athlete. Imagine promoting your best player to head coach with no playbook, no system, and no practice structure. Just: go lead.
It happens every day. We built STEER because we kept seeing this gap, across every client, every coaching relationship, every organization.
Leaders don’t fail because they don’t care. They fail because no one ever trained them.
The most important leadership lessons I carry with me come from practice. From the film room. From coaches who pushed me hard enough that the pressure of a real game felt familiar instead of paralyzing, and who cared enough to hold that standard every single day.
The best coaches do two things: they demand a lot, and they care deeply. Most leaders miss that balance.
Athletes understand something most corporate training programs miss: You do not rise to the occasion. You fall to the level of your training.
The
Center for Creative Leadership reinforces this through the 70-20-10 model: 70 percent of development happens through real experience, 20 percent through other people, 10 percent through formal learning.
The classroom sets the stage. Practice builds the skill. Most leadership programs get this backward. They invest in content and neglect deliberate practice. Then they wonder why nothing changes.
STEER Lab runs on four forces we’ve studied, tested, and refined across real teams and real environments:
Neuroscience and sport psychology
How leaders actually think, react, and perform under pressure. How the brain drives focus, emotion, and habits and how to build performance that holds when it matters.
Behavioral and organizational science
Great teams are built on systems. The rhythms, structures, and feedback loops that keep teams aligned and executing, especially when things get hard.
Timeless wisdom
Principles grounded in traditions like Stoic philosophy that have deeply shaped how I lead and how we develop leaders. The fundamentals that have guided leaders for thousands of years and still do.
Empirical data
Leadership has to work in real life. In necessary conversations. In fast decisions. In moments that don’t wait. Everything in STEER comes from what actually delivers results across thousands of leaders and teams.
We organize these into the STEER Conditioning Cycle:
Readiness. Practice. Performance. Recovery. Command.
The same loop elite athletes use to build endurance, clarity, and resilience—applied to leadership.
After thirty years of studying it, here is what I’ve learned:
Winning teams train before the moment demands it. They build habits before pressure tests them. They put in the reps so performance feels familiar.
Gallup’s 2025 research shows manager engagement has dropped to its lowest level in over a decade, costing $438 billion in lost productivity. The cause is clear: managers are not trained. And 70 percent of team engagement flows directly from them.
The organizations that train their leaders like athletes, with real systems, coaching, and practice, will create a compounding advantage.
That is what STEER Lab is. The practice field for leadership. Where leaders build real skills through consistent, structured training. Every week.
You do not need to be an athlete to lead like one. You can rewire your neural pathways and build the mindset, the system, the discipline.
That is what the STEER Lab delivers.
