Sally Jenkins: Lessons on Work and Life

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Writing about lessons learned from sports is something I have been doing for a few decades. The games and the athletes who play them provide insights into preparation, play, and conduct – on and off the field. The coaches who manage the teams best connect individually to players and collectively to the group so that every athlete is focused on what they need to do to win.

Few know the world of sports better than?Sally Jenkins , a long-time columnist for the?Washington Post?and?New York Times?best-selling author of a dozen books, including her newest,?The Right Call: What Sports Teaches Us about Work and Life . ?And to me, the subtitle sums up the book's intentions – provide lessons to enable us to achieve our best.

Sports lessons

Jenkins quotes her father, the legendary author and sports journalist?Dan Jenkins, ?saying, "Real sports is not for kids." By that, her father means their impact on those who play the game. "Who can describe the athletic heart?" Jenkins senior asked. Her new book explores that question in detail. Essential elements of athletic success include conditioning, practice, discipline, candor, culture, and learning from failure.?

In a recent interview , Sally Jenkins told me that athletes are as flawed as human beings as anyone. Citing her father’s insights, Jenkins said athletes show “a deep intelligence at work. It's not the type that we tend to think of, but there's a deep, deep, deep intelligence and commitment at work in these athletes that's, that's really worth studying closely and drawing the right lessons from them.”

Accountability is critical to team success. Jenkins, who wrote a biography of?Pat Summitt , the legendary women's basketball coach at the University of Tennessee, says, “Pat told me once that there's a language that a championship team starts to speak to each other. She said, you can hear it, you can hear it. When a champ, when a team's getting ready to win something big, you can hear it in the way they talk to each other. And I said, well, what does that sound like? And she said, well, it sounds like I've got you, I've got your back.”

Leadership lessons

Citing the work of Robert Hogan , social psychologist and founder of the Hogan Assessments firm, Jenkins says that, too often, organizations measure leaders by their results. That overlooks something important: how their people regard them. "Pat Riley, the president of the Miami Heat, has a great description," says Jenkins. "When people don't trust the leader and the leader's decisions, they will start 'subtly gearing down their efforts.' [They will] enroll everyone else in their own cycles of disillusionment or disappointment.” This observation explains “why charismatic, aggressive leaders at the top of an organization, but the organization can be so mediocre."

Leaders who succeed need to set standards. Jenkins recalled Pat Summit telling her, "As a leader, you have to start tough, and then you can get a little nicer. But if you start nice and then try to get tougher, people really don't trust it, and they won't go with it, and they won't understand it. So, you know, you have to establish the standard at the outset, and you really can't waffle on it."

“It’s not enough for a leader to have strong intentions,” writes Jenkins in her book. “Others have to perceive you as having?good?intentions." Or as Tom Brady, whom she quotes, puts it, "If you don't care about the people you work with, you're hosed." Athletes play an inside game to put themselves into a position to lead by example and service their teammates and the game itself.

Life lessons

Sports are not the same as real life. Sports are about boundaries on the pitch, limitations to time, choice of equipment, and the ever-present eye of referees. Defined outcomes are what sports are about. Seldom is that the case for life itself. Yet we can draw great lessons from the athletes who play the games we love to watch.

“Most people think that dealing with pressure is about actually rising to an extraordinary level, when in fact, the people who really succeed in things, what they're good at is.. being themselves in the moment. They are doing what is so well-practiced and grooved in them. Their performance is not deteriorating under pressure like other people's performances.”

This distinction, says Jenkins, is “critical for the rest of us [when] we think we're supposed to do something extraordinary. No. Do what you're best practiced at and what is most natural in the moment to you. Be yourself in the moment, and that will be good enough.”

For my full LinkedIn Live interview with Sally Jenkins,?click here .

First posted on Forbes.com 6.14.2023

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Grace Under Pressure: Leading Through Change and Crisis ?– Now available on?Audible .