The Sport of Leadership

We are all reeling from the loss we suffered yesterday and it's true it felt personal. A team that played so brilliantly across the entire duration of the tournament, got out played at the very end.

Sport is humbling. Sport is the great leveller and sport is the great redeemer.

While, the loss will stay with me, seeing Rohit Sharma, Virat, Bumrah and Shami do what they do time and again and endure loss makes me wonder how critical it is that we evaluate leadership positions based on sporting experience if any.

Sport builds character, tenacity and grit. I remember when you are younger interviews always involved questions about extra curricular activities, but as you grow both in age and in your profession, questions about extra curricular activities vanish and are replaced by very pointed yet pertinent questions about the job at hand and the experience.

If you just look at the entire Indian squad, they've all had personal battles most notably Virat and his disastrous England tour, KL and his form, Bumrah and his injury and everyone knows Shami's battles on and off the field. What is interesting is their comebacks, their mental tenacity and makeup and just their resolve. Every great leader needs those qualities, and I think an entire workforce needs to embody these traits to build a sustainable business.

Sport, should be a critical factor in deciding how hiring is done. If a person has played a sport at any level, school, college, or even nationally, they will have what it takes to see a bad phase through, not only that it teaches you to work well with others, put in the work, assess a bad situation, be strategic, manage people and well bounce back from injury.

While in school, I played basketball for the school team and the state, the lessons I learnt on the court had been lost for sometime, but the vigour with which our team played their brand of cricket it renewed the lessons I learnt as a young boy.

At the end of it all, yesterday was a small bump in the road for the Indian side, they are champions. If anything, the lessons they taught us on teamwork, leadership, tenacity and grit will go a long way in shaping young and few old folk like me in all walks of life.

And if Ted Lasso taught us anything it's "Be a goldfish"