Eye On the Prize

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In team sports, athletes learn not only to master themselves but also to manage relationships and pursue a common goal. Team players "have to understand roles, responsibility, and accountability--what it's like to have a mission and a dream and to work collectively to achieve that," says Brown. And because many people learn better by doing than by studying, a football field or basketball court can be a highly effective classroom for future leaders, according to John Eliot, professor of performance psychology at Rice University and author of Overachievement: The New Model for Exceptional Performance.

One crucial skill business leaders acquire from team sports is motivation. Robert Maffei, president of Maffei Landscape Contractors, a $7 million company in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, played football in high school. "Once a week, the coach would blow a whistle and yell 'Bring it in!'" he recalls. "We'd get on one knee in front of him and have a meeting." During that meeting, the coach would designate players of the week, and each honoree wore a sticker on his helmet with pride.

Those huddles boosted morale and performance, Maffei remembers, something he naturally wants to do for his business. So every week, Maffei rings a bell and yells "Bring it in!" to his 80 employees. "My employees don't get down on one knee or anything like that," says Maffei. "But we gather at 7:20 in the morning on Thursdays for 15 minutes for a team meeting." Recalling how much that football sticker motivated him on the field, Maffei designed a more elaborate reward program for his company. Employees of the week receive gift certificates for Dunkin' Donuts or a local movie theater. Employees of the month are in line for flat-screen TVs or Xboxes. And the employee of the year walks away with an all-expenses-paid trip for two to the Caribbean.

Entrepreneurs also transfer behaviors that worked on the field--or in Hart's case in the sky--to their daily lives as leaders. As Hart paid more attention to his fellow jumpers and diving coach, his team started to win competitions. He tried treating clients the same way--and finally heard what they were telling him. "Although our application was beautiful to look at, it was too graphic-intensive," he says. "We completely reworked the design with the input of our clients." Sales growth at Hart's business has jumped from 19 percent the year he started diving to 31 percent today.

Perhaps the most universal effect is that sports exercise the persistence muscle. "Failure is part of the process," says Chris Kouloukas, founder and CEO of SOHO Hero, a franchiser of print and copy shops based in Atlanta. Kouloukas started out in Little League at age 7 and played baseball through his years at Troy University in Alabama. While he won plenty of games, he also got comfortable with loss. "The greatest hitters of all time hit .400, which means they fail 60 percent of the time," Kouloukas says.

Kouloukas brought that perspective to his business, refusing to let failure bog him down. "To get my first loan, I went to 54 banks before I was approved. Fifty-four banks!" says Kouloukas. "And even when I was sitting at the closing table, the banker looked me in the eye and said, 'Chris, I won't be upset if you back out of this deal. I still don't see how you're going to compete.'" But Kouloukas never lost faith. Today, SOHO Hero has 30 locations throughout the Southeast, and those setbacks are ancient history.

Of course, business leaders have also been known to transfer undesirable behaviors from the field to the office. Some athletes, for example, like to see what they can get away with. A sports cliché holds that "if a penalty isn't called, then it isn't a foul," says Rice University's Eliot. As recent corporate scandals attest, that kind of thinking isn't foreign to business.

Finally, remember that the sports analogy has its limits. "In baseball, the worst thing that can happen is you can lose the game," Kouloukas says. "The stakes are higher in business. When you fail, you can lose money--and sometimes other people's money." So apply the lessons of the playing field to your business. But never tell yourself that it's only a game.

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