Turbulent Times Call for
Athletic Leaders
CEOs who can turn
turmoil into triumph have many personality traits in common with world-class
athletes.
Over
the last decade, we studied CEOs of companies that thrive within some of the
most challenging business environments on the planet. Though very different in
many respects, these CEOs share leadership behaviours and attitudes that
strongly parallel those of top athletes. We further theorise that these
athletic traits make CEOs uniquely suited to tackle contexts where little can
be taken for granted.
Four
of them, in particular, achieved extraordinary results against the backdrop of
a prolonged economic recession and international economic sanctions. Herman
Gref has transformed Sberbank from a sleeping behemoth into a dynamic digital
company providing services ranging from traditional banking to
telecommunications to more than 100 million customers, and delivering superior
shareholder returns. Under Vitaly Saveliev’s leadership, Aeroflot has become
the most valuable airline brand in the world, quadrupled its passenger count
and became the most efficient airline in Europe. Alexander Dykov, CEO of
Gazprom Neft since 2007, has turned a loose amalgamation of upstream and
downstream assets into the most dynamic energy company in Russia, doubling its
reserves, production and refining volumes. Eugene Kaspersky built Kaspersky Lab
into a global household brand across the world, supplying anti-virus protection
to more than 400 million people in 200 countries.
The
“athletic” mind-set
These
CEOs share three fundamental qualities that we have also identified in
interviews with world-class athletes for our book “Athletic
Ceos: Leadership in Turbulent Times”: formative
experience, mental toughness, and adaptability.
Formative
experience.
Athletic
leaders share a formative experience of practicing competitive sports in their
youth, facing early adversity as leaders of important projects, and changing
companies and industries along the way. They occupied leadership positions early
in their lives – when most of their contemporaries still had entry-level jobs.
Saveliev ran a huge organisation at the age of 28. At the same age Gref became
head of a property management fund in a town near St. Petersburg, and Dyukov
was appointed CFO of St. Petersburg’s oil terminal (and would become the CEO
the following year). Eugene Kaspersky headed a group of software designers at
the age of 26 and started his own business at the age of 31. Early exposure to
leadership made them comfortable running organisations and contributed to their
self-confidence and winning mentality.
Mental
Toughness.
Like
top athletes, athletic leaders thrive in competition, push themselves and their
organisations to the edge, and stay focused on the goal regardless of the
external distractions.
When
Herman Gref became Sberbank’s CEO he was not only a novice banker but also a
novice CEO, yet he was confident that Sberbank would become a world-class
organisation and made it an explicit goal. Ambition and belief in ability to
win makes athletic leaders consider difficult tasks as challenges to be
mastered rather than threats to be avoided. The leaders we studied are also
passionate about their business, the organisations they head, and people they
lead. They speak about them with enthusiasm, devote most of their time to them,
and willingly make minor and major sacrifices for them. Passion gives them
motivation, energy and focus. Viacheslav Fetisov, the many-time Olympic
and world champion and captain of the famous ‘Red Machine’ USSR ice-hockey team
in 1980s told us that ‘you cannot keep winning, playing or training beyond the
pain barrier for money – you have to love it!’. Focus on performance and total
concentration are the cornerstones of daily life, training, and competition for
top athletes. Athletic leaders are similar. Bombarded with myriad ideas,
requests, and demands on their time, they stay centered on their priorities,
pursuing them with unparalleled passion. One Gazprom Neft executive describes
CEO Alexander Dyukov as a man who ‘when he decides on something will make sure
you do that, no matter what’.
Passion
fires up athletic leaders, but just like athletic champions they master their
emotions when the time comes to make important decisions or negotiate
significant deals. Keeping a cool head means that a leader has a strong ability
to stay calm and think clearly under very stressful conditions. A leader with a
cool head applies logic to the situation, analyzes available data, seeks expert
advice, considers different options, and synthesizes a solution. In 2009, just
a few months after becoming Aeroflot’s CEO, Vitaly Saveliev made the
controversial decision to take 26 TU-154 airplanes out of service. The company
was in very bad shape and every rouble of revenue counted. Many company
veterans asked him to reconsider, but the new CEO stayed firm. Mathematical
analysis subsequently proved that, because of very low fuel efficiency, every
TU-154 flight added $10,000 to $20,000 to the company’s losses.
High-achievement
sport requires athletes to go beyond what is considered possible for human
beings. Rasmus Ankersen, a bestselling author and expert in high performance in
sport, quotes one European long-distance runner: ‘Here (in Kenya) I see runners
suffer to a degree that I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine anybody in the
West subjecting themselves to. This is a fast moving journey which wrenches the
body beyond its moral limitations: it starts with the recognition that pain is
the validation of accomplishment’. A leader’s mercilessness is not only about
the number and intensity of their working hours; it also translates into
demanding standards of behaviour, extremely challenging goals, and zero
tolerance for low performance and mediocrity.
Mental
Adaptability.
At
the same time, athletic leaders demonstrate high levels of flexibility in goal
setting, strategising, and organising execution. The tension between toughness
and mental adaptability forms the mental foundation of athletic leadership.
For
the purposes of our leadership model and the following discussion we will treat
proactive curiosity as a trait of athletic leaders, which results in specific
repetitive behaviors. Our protagonists demonstrate what Cicero called a
‘passion for learning’ in relation to their businesses and leadership projects
and many other subjects besides. Almost every meeting we had in carrying out
our research for this book started with a question from our interviewees:
‘What’s new in your part of the world?’ Vitaly Saveliev always asked about our
last experience of flying Aeroflot and Alexander Dyukov enquired about the
situation in France and Western Europe. Herman Gref, who is reputed to be
Russia’s number one business leader for learning, reads about 300 books a year,
regularly goes to Silicon Valley to explore business and technology innovation,
attends conferences, asks questions, and listens, listens, listens to people
from all over the world.
Athletic
leaders’ proactive curiosity is complemented by a conscious process of rapid
knowledge updating, which takes multiple forms. Vitaly Saveliev entered civil
aviation – an industry known for its technical sophistication – at the age of
56 without any insider knowledge. He immediately set up a ‘Saturday school’ – a
weekly workshop with consultants to learn about aviation. In just six months,
he reached the same standard as veteran Aeroflot executives. And within two
years he knew enough to develop Aeroflot’s new strategy. Today, other airline CEOs
seek his advice on industry matters. Herman Gref, who had never been a banker
before joining Sberbank, became an industry authority in three years, a black
belt in Lean Production in a year, and an authority on the digital economy less
than two years after first encountering the topic.
Adaptability
allows athletic CEOs to adjust their mental models – internal explanations of
how the world and its component parts function. Their mental representations of
their businesses, industries, and countries – and the global environments in
which all of these operate – evolve all the time, allowing new strategic
approaches to emerge. Research shows that most CEOs remain ‘one trick ponies’
for the duration of their tenure and inflexible mental models become their major
handicap when the world moves ahead. Athletic leaders do not suffer from this
disease.
Now that we have
described the personal qualities that distinguish athletic leaders, in future
INSEAD Knowledge posts we will address how such leaders approach more practical
matters such as day-to-day habits, outcomes and outputs.
Stanislav Shekshnia, INSEAD Senior Affiliate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise
Read more at
https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/turbulent-times-call-for-athletic-leaders-8026?utm_source=INSEAD+Knowledge&utm_campaign=93e82724ca-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e079141ebb-93e82724ca-249840429#DWi7AaIcC77oeqbj.99
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