From identifying and promoting talent to what makes a great leader, there’s plenty businesses could learn from sport, say Florence Hamilton and Ronan Dunne
“Women who play sports are more likely to be business leaders”. This finding from a Women’s Sports Foundation report made headlines around the world last year.
We weren’t surprised. In fact, we think business should talk more about what we can learn from sport.
It’s 2025, but too many companies still look to hire based on outdated archetypes of what a leader looks and sounds like. Sports has its own issues with equality and equity, but it gets a few core things right: 1) managers know that matching talent to opportunity is key to effective performance, and 2) in sport, it is accepted that great captains and great leaders are rarely the brightest or the best themselves, but they are picked because they excel at creating the conditions for success.
The business world is still too quick to hire in the embedded image of a leader: usually an older man with the “right” qualifications and experience. Meanwhile, opportunities for female and diverse talent to advance too often remain blocked.
Overall, the business community still has work to do when it comes to genuinely matching talent to opportunity. To do this, we must reframe perceptions of what a leader and a great team looks like, and then re-plumb the hiring and promotion system. We believe there are simple things CEOs and NEDs can do to help make this transition – many of them learned from sport.
Invest in C-Suite / top-level mindset-shifting
Gender-balancing is about leadership and it comes from the top. It’s up to leadership to impart it as a value throughout the whole company, to embed it in company DNA, and hold every single person accountable. That is the only way to really create the conditions for diverse talent to succeed in the long-term.
We believe the process starts with shifting your make-up at Board and C-Suite level. Women now occupy 44.7 per cent of board positions across FTSE 100 companies, up from 40 per cent in 2023, which demonstrates progress. However, research recently revealed women still struggle to occupy the most senior roles such as chair and chief executive, holding just 12.2 per cent of executive director positions. Latest data shows there are still only 19 female CEOs in the FTSE 350 – a meagre 5.4 per cent of roles – and just eight women CEOs at the top 50 UK private corporations.
This means key decision-makers remain largely male, and they generally skew older. This hampers change when it comes to reaching parity in the talent pipeline, as the people working on the everyday concerns of the business are not representative. In our experience, these decision makers often unintentionally see talent through a specific lens and visually ascribe leadership to a certain cohort. But if you make parity changes at the executive director level and elevate diverse role models, you will see positive changes in your business.
Stop relying so heavily on executive search firms
Relying on executive search firms can mean a company is not hiring from an extensive enough pool to allow leadership to pick the right talent.
Hiring from such selective pools may be easier and save time in the short-term, but businesses will ultimately be more successful if they emulate sports teams and hire from around the globe to form the most powerful and effective teams. In our experience, this is worth the extra time and expense in the long run.
The London 2012 Olympics is the perfect sporting example of this approach succeeding in practice. Before the games, the British Olympic Association widened its talent search pool to ensure greater gender balance in Team GB. They launched programmes including “Girls4Gold”, which sought out talent from a range of sporting backgrounds and helped transition them into Olympic disciplines, and worked with national governing bodies to scout and develop female athletes in underrepresented sports. The BOA also worked on increasing female representation in coaching and leadership roles to create a more inclusive training environment. The efforts paid off. They led to London 2012 being the most gender-balanced Olympics ever for Team GB, with women winning more medals than men for the first time in history.
Identify the ingredients for success
Sport is better than business at recognising the importance of celebrating and promoting several different types of talent within a single team. It is also more adept at recognising that not only does balance in a team require different skills, but it is only by getting that balance right that you can deliver the range of outcomes that are key to success.
In sport, there are multiple positions with equal importance, and everything is centred around configuring your best resources against a particular challenge or opportunity. This is why sports teams have a bench, and businesses can do well to emulate this approach: identify the very different, equally important skills your team needs to succeed in the current environment, and act accordingly.
Similarly, don’t be afraid to switch out different types of talent at different stages.
A great current example of this strategic talent approach is England rugby coach Steve Borthwick’s use of Fin and Marcus Smith. Both players play No 10 (Fly Half) for their clubs and are world-class talents. Rather than seeing his only option as choosing between them, Borthwick has picked both and sometimes deploys Marcus Smith in the fullback role, before tactically switching his position at different times and phases of the game.
Borthwick knows that it’s essential to get the best people on board, and then to not constrain them through rigid structures and hierarchies. We know the same applies in business.
Ultimately, as a business leader it’s not what you do, it’s what you make happen. Overcoming entrenched inequalities requires long-term commitment, but it is possible – as demonstrated by the brilliant companies who win the BiB awards every year. Creating a better business environment is a trophy we should all fight to win. Let’s do it.
Florence Hamilton is a serial entrepreneur, and founder of INSEAD Alumni Balance in Business (BiB), and Ronan Dunne is Chairman of Six Nations Rugby and former CEO of Verizon and O2