Sports Story of the Week
New Study: Girls Who Play Change The Game
Anyone that has been around me for longer than a few minutes in leadership trainings know how strongly I feel about sports creating leaders. I often reference the study by EY and ESPNW in 2015 on the statistic that 94% of Women in the C-Suite played sport. Well now, thanks to e.l.f. and Parity, we now have even more data to back up this finding.
I acknowledge, as does this report, that sports aren't the only avenue to learn these lessons, and you can learn some of them without actually stepping on the field, court, ice, or whatever your surface of sports may be. But for most of us, sports references certainly can drive home points that are not comparable or visible in other ways. Sports are both the tool for learning, and the tool for translating the lessons.
The newly released report, Girls Who Play Change The Game, again, done by Parity and e.l.f. they classified three groups, Everyday Athletes, Pro Athletes, and their focus on Board Members in business with not much sports experience. As they stated
"This research sits at the intersection of our shared purpose and it starts with EVERYDAY ATHLETES: women who are now working full-time and played sports for at least three years before the end of high/secondary school. We analyzed their perspectives, alongside PRO ATHLETES, BOARD MEMBERS and women with less or no sports experience, resulting in one of the largest and broadest studies of its kind."
The global nature of this study had interesting data points and while overall the message was the same, there were some unique items from women in the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. I will be digging into all the details over the coming weeks on my social media, but in my quest to keep this newsletter short and hit the highlights, I will focus the lessons below on some of the data that intrigued me the most and seems most relevant with what I currently see happening across business and industry.
The 3 Lessons from the Women in Sports
1. Sports Fuel Ambition
Both the Everyday Athletes and Pro Athletes were more likely than their non sports counterparts to aspire and desire to be in leadership one day. This one feels particularly important. As we see the decrease of raw ambition in the workplace, and studies and articles are being published to discuss how the desire to have a skills based career is much more highly desired than leading people. I firmly believe that there are many reasons, and I realize this issue is complex, but the absolute innate desire for continuous growth, improvement and advancement is natural from sport. We don't have a great future in our businesses if we don't have managers that want to lead people. That desire for more; more responsibility, more decision making, more leadership. We also can't always teach ambition. We can hold standards that create great results, but inner ambition helps fuel that fire.
2. Sports Teach Professional Skills
When asking what skills that employers want most out of their employees, the ones that rise to the top seem to closely align with what sports teaches. Topping the list for what skills the athletes learned were Teamwork, Performing Under Pressure, Communication, and Adaptability. There are other ways to develop these skills of course, but none in the same combination and with the same intensity and recognition as what playing sports teaches. From the constant coaching, the forced team roles, and the true black and white nature of wins/losses and success/failure, it is inherent that you can't compete in sport without learning these life lessons. These lessons can and will be learned in the workplace, but the learning curve is steeper, and the mistakes compound when you are learning both business skills and the professional skills concurrently.
3. Sports Build Confidence
Across all the characteristics, all the interviews, the surveys, and the countries, one of the most common characteristics for women to learn in sports was confidence. Rounding out the top was resilience, mental strength and trust in self. I certainly realize the distinction, but to me so many of these skills come back to having both inner confidence and the ability to put it on display. To hold your ground. To step up in the big moments. To willingly put yourself in the spotlight. To try something new. To be truly confident, not confident you will succeed, but confident you will survive and come out the other side. We have to have this confidence in business. To challenge our peers, to take charge of a project that might not work, to present an idea, to appropriately challenge authority, to be confident enough to dream big and own it.
