Compete From Your Values. Lead Like An Athlete. Perform Over The Long Season.
At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, I competed with an injury. I did not medal that day, but I finished the season 5th in the world ranking, against the best in the sport. That season did not teach me about winning. It taught me what holds when conditions turn against you: not a tactic, not a performance plan, but a set of values so internalised they became the decision-making engine when everything else was unreliable.
The gap between where many organisations are and where they know they could be is rarely a strategy gap. It is a values and performance gap. Fix that, and strategy, execution, and team cohesion begin to move on their own. This edition is about the Athlete Attitude in Values-Based Leadership: what it means to lead from your values, and what elite sport teaches us about making that real.
🧙 Values Are Not a Statement on the Wall. They Are Your Decision-Making Engine.
Ask any leader whether they lead by their values and most will say yes. Ask them to name those values, describe how they showed up in the last difficult decision, and explain how their team experiences them on a Tuesday morning: the answer becomes much less clear.
Values-based leadership is not a philosophy for the annual offsite. It is an operating discipline, and the McKinsey 7S model shows why.
💡 What the McKinsey 7S model actually says
The model maps seven elements every organisation runs on: strategy, structure, systems, style, staff, skills, and shared values. Six are operational levers. Shared values sit at the centre because they are what the other six pull toward, or quietly drift away from, when nobody is watching.
Leadership begins with a clear understanding of purpose and values, paired with self-awareness. You must lead yourself before you can lead others. Authentic leadership rests on three non-negotiables: self-awareness and emotional intelligence, clear communication of vision and values, and consistent actions that build trust. That foundation is what makes a well-designed strategy hold at the point of execution.
Eight traits distinguish authentic leaders in practice: self-aware, honest, genuine, emotionally intelligent, humble, consistent, purpose-driven, and ethical. These are performance traits, not soft ones. They determine whether a team trusts a leader enough to give its full capability, or holds back.
💡 The two-minute test
At the end of the day, ask four questions: Did my actions today reflect my values? Who can give me honest feedback right now? Who needs a listening ear from me? Did I model what I want to see in others? If the answers reveal a gap, close it before tomorrow.
The Daily Values Audit turns that test into a habit:
Did my actions today reflect my values? If not, where is the gap?
Who gave me honest feedback this week? Did I create space for it?
Who in my team needs to be heard right now, not instructed?
Did I lead by example today? If there was a gap, did I address it?
💪 What Elite Athletes Know About Leading From Values
Many leadership coaches reference elite sport as a metaphor. The difference in my case is straightforward: I competed in it, at the highest level, in two completely different disciplines, reaching a top 5 world ranking in both. Snowboard halfpipe at the 2002 Winter Olympics, and cross-country paragliding as a multiple German Champion and World Cup competitor, a discipline I describe as three-dimensional chess with 100-plus opponents.
“Many leadership coaches reference elite sport. I competed in it.”
These two sports could not be more different in their performance demands. Halfpipe requires explosive peak performance, a flow-state execution window measured in seconds. Cross-country paragliding requires sustained strategic decision-making under uncertainty, reading an invisible environment over hours, with no coach, no team, and no second chance if the judgment is wrong. Those are, not coincidentally, the same two performance challenges every founder and business leader eventually has to solve.
What both sports share is this: values are not optional when conditions deteriorate. Sportsmanship, fairness, and respect for the competition are not sentimental ideals in elite sport, they are what you fall back on when no one is watching and everything is on the line. In solo sport, there is no team to blame, no external authority to defer to. You compete with the values you have built, or you do not compete at all.
That is the clarity behind The Athlete Attitude in Business Leadership, the framework I bring into how leaders operate. This edition applies it through a values lens: the Athlete Attitude in Values-Based Leadership. It covers the complete performance picture any leader building an elite-level organisation must address:
🎯 Goal Setting & Strategic Clarity
Elite athletes do not train without knowing what they are training for. Clear, measurable goals are the navigation system for everything that follows.
🔍 Honest Self-Assessment
Athletes review performance with ruthless honesty, not to be hard on themselves, but to identify what to change before the next competition. Leaders who build this same discipline catch patterns early, before they scale.
📚 Disciplined Development
Athletes do not stop training when things get hard, they train with more precision. Effective leaders apply the same instinct: they sharpen their own development exactly when the pressure is highest, which is precisely where the gap closes.
🤝 Building High-Performance Teams
Even in individual sports, performance is shaped by the environment around you: coaches, competitors, training partners. Leaders who build teams aligned on values, not just tasks, create organisations that outperform the talent on paper.
⚡ Performing Under Pressure
Pressure does not build character, it reveals it. Elite athletes train to access their best under race conditions, not just in practice. Business leaders need the same capability: to perform when the stakes are real and the margin for error is narrow.
💪 Resilience to Sustain Results Over Time
The athletes who build long careers do not just recover from setbacks, they build a cycle that sustains energy and ambition across seasons. The business equivalent is an organisation that wins this quarter and is still winning three years from now.
I spent nearly a decade at Mitsubishi Chemical leading global teams across continents and cultures, shaping commercial strategy for a billion-euro business. The methodology I bring to clients combines the engineer’s precision, the elite athlete’s performance approach, and the executive’s commercial judgement: honest diagnosis, deliberate practice, measurable targets, and the mental resilience to sustain it all under real pressure.
🏆 Becoming an Athlete Leader: Where Values and Performance Converge
The leaders who close the performance gap in their organisations are not the ones with the best strategy decks. They are the ones whose teams trust them enough to execute without constant supervision, push back without fear, and give full effort because they believe in what they are building. That kind of leadership is earned, not assumed.
Research is consistent on why high performers stay and give their best: they feel genuinely appreciated, they do work that matters, they feel connected to a bigger purpose, they have a leader who has their back, and they feel safe to be themselves. Psychological safety, the condition where challenge is received constructively rather than triggering defensiveness, is the operational environment that makes high performance possible. Effective leaders build it deliberately through values-led behaviour, not through policy.
McKinsey research confirms that positive team climate, the single strongest driver of psychological safety, is built through consultative and supportive leadership behaviours: leaders who solicit input, consider their team’s views, demonstrate concern for their people as individuals, and model the behaviours they expect.
📈
Perform
Execute at the elite level with strategic clarity and measurable results
🏃
Lead
Make values-driven decisions under real pressure
⏳
Sustain
Win this quarter and still be winning three years from now
This is what I call becoming an Athlete Leader: someone who has internalised The Athlete Attitude in Business Leadership and applies it to the full complexity of leading others. Not a metaphor, not a motivational label: a genuinely different way of approaching goals, development, pressure, teams, and the long game of sustained high performance.
The question worth sitting with this week is not whether you lead by your values. It is whether your team experiences your values in the decisions you make, the conversations you have, and the environment you create every day.
Knowledge Nugget
Values are not a statement on the wall; they are the decision-making engine that holds when conditions turn against you. Build that discipline daily, through honest self-assessment, deliberate development, and consistent behaviour, so it is ready long before the pressure test arrives.
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