Overcoming leadership shock with Olympic coach Pete Steinberg

What lessons from elite athletic coaching can empower today’s business leaders? With the summer Olympics just around the corner, we asked Pete Steinberg, leadership consultant and celebrated rugby coach, that very question.

He discusses how feedback is the fuel of high performance, in sports and business. Like a rugby coach leading from the stands, the further up the leadership ladder, the less control you have. That's why Steinberg provides strategies for empowering your employees to manage strategic decisions and conflict.

We also delve into his new book, Leadership Shock, which addresses navigating new and fundamentally different leadership challenges using his Authentic Leadership Model.

He discusses finding purpose as a leader, understanding self-identity, and building a culture of experimentation.

Featuring: Pete Steinberg, President of Innovative Thought and author of Leadership Shock. Find out more about Pete and his book here: Innovative Thought - Peter Steinberg Book

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.

Transcript

[00:00:00] You're listening to The Catalyst by Softchoice, a podcast about unleashing the potential in people and technology. I'm your host, Aaron Brooks.

Imagine for a moment being thrust into a leadership role that leaves you in a state of shock, where your body is functioning, but somehow you still feel powerless. This unsettling sensation isn't just confined to dramatic life events. It's a common feeling that many leaders experience when they step into new roles within their organizations.

Between the fast paced back to back meetings and managing team dynamics, it can all feel very overwhelming, leaving leaders grappling for control. And that's exactly why I'm meeting with former Olympic coach Pete Steinberg today. He understands better than most what it takes to not only forge champions on the field, but also in the boardroom.

Pete's life story reads like an epic sports saga. With lessons that transcend far [00:01:00] beyond the athletic arena. In 1995, he replaced Charlie Smith as the head coach for the Penn State women's rugby team, building on coach Smith's dynasty and leading the team to win 10 national championships over his career.

Pete also led the U. S. women's rugby team to two world cups and an appearance at the Olympics in Rio. But his influence doesn't stop at the sidelines. Transitioning from the sports field to the corporate boardroom, Pete now tackles the complex dynamics. In his new book, Leadership Shock, Pete draws parallels between the high stakes world of sport and the equally intense realm of corporate management through stories of athletic excellence and personal experience Pete shares how embracing the authentic leadership model can help leaders overcome the most pressing challenges.

So, hey, Peter, welcome to the show. Thanks, Aaron. Excited to be here. Yeah, it's awesome. This is one of those topics and my producers told me ahead of time that just will be mindful of time because I know how much you love this topic. [00:02:00] And part of the reason for that Peter is I've been a rep hockey coach for 15 years.

So coaching has been a real mainstay of just who I am as a, as a human being and individual. And the amount of lessons that I've learned that I've taken to leadership at work are immense. And so when I heard that you were joining us today and we were having this topic on leadership and the link to sport, I was super, super excited.

Uh, I would love to maybe start. Just on a personal side, like tell me a little bit about your history on the coaching side, if you don't mind. I won't start at birth, Aaron. You know, when I was growing up, I was a pretty mediocre rugby player to the point that I didn't even play in high school, but I always loved the sport and picked it up and my dad's American.

So I had a U. S. passport. I was a rugby player. I was pretty mediocre. America had a pretty mediocre team. Maybe I should go to America and see if I could play for the U. S. That was sort of like my naive step. So, um, I went to Penn State to do actually a PhD in geochemistry in 1994. [00:03:00] Class starts. I go to my first rugby practice and I find out that graduate students can't play.

So here I am 23. Penn State is in a town called State College. Because there's nothing there. I'm three hours away from Pittsburgh. I'm three hours away from Philly. Like I can't play. So I start coaching and it turns out I'm a much better coach than I ever was a player. I ended up coaching the Penn State women for 19 years.

When I dropped out of my PhD program, I wanted to stay in state college and I got a job at the business school through the head of accounting. Who founded the women's rugby program at Penn State, sat in the back of the classroom for six years as professors around the world came and did business education for executives.

And so I found myself getting that informal education, continue to coach. And that's kind of how I got into this business. I was fortunate enough to have a bit of a Talented coaching. We won 10 national championships with Penn State. I also coached the mid Atlantic men's provincial side or regional side.

[00:04:00] We won the national championship. I coached the women's U 23 team. I coached the men's USA Hawks, which is the team below the Eagles for the men, and then ended up coaching, um, The US women in 15s to two world cups and then was an assistant at the Rio Olympics in 2007 and then retired. So anyway, that's my, uh, that's my story.

And I'll just say left the business school after six years. And, and started my consulting business in leadership so I could support my rugby habit. So I could like go for a month to New Zealand and shadow like the Crusaders or go spend three months in San Diego when we prep for the Olympics. Like these are things that you couldn't ordinarily do.

That's amazing. It's also kind of funny. Like you arrive at a school and you find out some bad news that you can't play and look at the life it's now led you to. And so completely such a great life lesson. One of the things that I think makes coaching sport really hard is that we actually don't Interpret the result the [00:05:00] way we should, which is a lot of it is just luck.

Yep. It's totally true. The players don't have as much control as we think the coach certainly doesn't have as much control as we think. And so we just relate it to luck. And so I actually, in my coaching have, um, you know, really learned to let go. And I think this is a direct translation to leadership, let go of the result.

Yep. I'm really focused on the process. And I actually think in leadership, the interesting thing for me of what I've learned is that the further you get up the leadership ladder, the less control you have, the less cause and effect happens. Like when I'm a manager or when I'm just learning the business and I'm new, I can do things and I know what the outcome is.

Right. But when I'm a CEO, CEOs have very little control. They say stuff and then everyone else has to go do it. I don't know if they're going to do it the way I want it. I don't know what the outcomes are. So I think that cause and effect thing and being open to opportunities. That could seem bad. I think a really, it's a really important mindset.

[00:06:00] For sure. And you, you have to build that culture of trust around you in order for them to execute on the game plan. Like it's, it's impossible for you to be in all situations all the time. And things like practice are, are really important, but you, you kind of throw all that away in a game because now you're celebrating what you practiced.

And if you're thinking about the drills, you're thinking about the process. You will lose. And it's more about the execution of it. Yeah. So in rugby, the only thing you have is practice, really. And so you have to prepare the players. In fact, um, the last day in rugby, I don't do any, like the head coach doesn't do anything.

I have basically a couple of minutes where I talk. At the start of the warmup or the start of the game and about 10 minutes a half time and that's it. And so in rugby, you have to completely empower your players. They have to manage strategic decisions, tactical decisions, they have to manage conflict.

And so you have to run it like you are the CEO of the business, which is I can't run this business. And so bringing [00:07:00] in the real strong elements of delegation, A feedback, like having really defined feedback processes, I think is really critical in sport. In fact, I, I, I like to say that feedback is the fuel of high performance and that's true, whether it's in sport or whether it's in business and just like the CEO, the head coach, the hardest thing for you to get is honest feedback.

No one wants to tell you. No one can tell you you're not doing a good job, right? And same with the CEO. Like I was talking to a client a couple of weeks ago, new CEO, and he said, how do I know if anyone's telling me the truth? Like, interesting question, right? Just like a head coach. How do I know that the players and even my assistants, like I have such control and power over the careers of everyone around me.

What incentive do they have to actually tell me I'm not doing something right? It's really interesting. I've had this conversation with, um, a few that have gone through leadership development and like, what do they need to be successful? And I always say, you want to surround yourself with people who will die for you, not people who like you or want to make you happy.

And oh, [00:08:00] I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Fundamentally different people, people that'll die for you. We'll die for you by telling you the truth. They are okay to go into the uncomfortable and the vulnerable and share how it's really working. I think that's right. The reason that we don't like giving feedback isn't because the receiver doesn't want the feedback.

It's because it's hard for the giver to give it. And when I coached, one of the things I took was a really disciplined feedback process, when I would give feedback to an athlete, I would always ask them to give me feedback. Hmm. Yes. If you build those trusted relationships and you reward and recognize people that give you feedback, you're like, Hey, we're both on a development journey.

You want to be a better player tomorrow than you are today. I want to be a better coach tomorrow than I am today. I want to look back and look at yesterday's coach and be like, what the heck was I doing? It's so true. And so, and so that, that journey that only happens if you have that continuous feedback, actually changing your behavior becomes really hard in business because every change comes with a consequence.

Right? So why would I change? And so we actually talked about [00:09:00] that with this team, about how they could, with each other, create a safe environment where they could practice and experiment. I love that. Right? And be in a place where like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to do something differently, but it's going to be okay.

Because we all know that we're in this space of continuous learning. So interesting. The experimentation and failure piece is a cultural thing that we haven't actually in business. We haven't. Struck in sport. We have, in fact, I, I have told players, I want you to make more mistakes. Yes. Like I actually want to go out, you need to make five mistakes in this game, because that stretches you to do your best in business.

We're scared to make ever one mistake. And that's true. That completely gets in the way of the growth of the organization and the individual. That's true. And it's funny, like I've been here for 20 years at softwares. Which is pretty long to be at one company, especially in technology. And I get asked a lot, like, why are you here?

Like, what, what happened? Um, and I've done a lot of different roles that I'm probably not qualified for. And we do have a bit of a culture of putting people in a position to [00:10:00] stretch and not fear of, Oh, if it didn't work, that somehow your job's at risk. And so I think they've done that really well, uh, at Softchoice allowed them to do that, but it is, it is rare.

Can I, But can I challenge you, Aaron? Yeah. Because I think the way we define whether you're qualified for a job is often not the right qualification. So we, we define qualifications as often experience and skills. Yes. Right. So do they have the experience and skills for the, guess what? Experience and skills are the most malleable, easily changeable things.

Right. So you take someone who has no experience, you put them in the job for a year. They have enough experience now, right? Like that's so true. The thing that you want to select for is attributes and mindsets are how they think and who they are. And so you may not have been qualified on the experience and skill level.

But I bet you were probably qualified on the attributes of mindset level and those things are much harder to change. Right? Yeah. And so I think the way we qualify [00:11:00] things, when we think about leadership selection often doesn't get us to the best leaders. And I actually think we have a measurement issue and it's the same measurement issue that we have in sport.

So in sport, we see a team win one, nothing. And we're like, Oh, that's the winning team. That's the better team. Yes. Well, that's because we're only measuring one thing. There's lots of other things we should measure. We have that same issue in leadership selection where it's very easy to measure experience, probably easy to measure skills.

Right. Um, but it's really hard to measure mindset and attitudes and those are harder to measure. And so because they're harder to measure and it's really hard to measure for an external candidate. And we're There's risk tolerance. So if I'm the HR person and I'm hiring someone and they don't work out, but they had all the right experience, not my fault, but if I hire someone doesn't have the right experience, but I thought they had the right mindset and attributes, now the risk is on me.

Now it's my choice. Now, if it doesn't work, I get held accountable. And so I [00:12:00] think both on the measurement side and on the sort of risk tolerance side, there's an issue that keeps organizations going back to experience and skills. That's a really good point. And I find this both in coaching and in business.

There's also the contingent of individuals that you really want them to take that next step to play at a higher level or to take that new job. And they themselves don't want to raise their hands because they'd rather be told, go do this. And now the pressure's off them because they've been told to do it.

Right. Versus saying, I want it. And now all of a sudden it's like pressures on them because, hey, you raised your hand. I thought you were capable of doing this. And it's such a old mindset. Yeah. That, you know, Aaron, I hadn't thought about that. That's really interesting. That's like the other side of the selection challenge.

There's probably some gender issues that should often come up in there that, that, and again, I I'm somebody who coached women's rugby for a long year. I don't fundamentally believe there's a difference between men and women. But there are a group of people, a lot of them tend to be women, but not all that don't put their hands up.

And there are a large group of [00:13:00] people, not all men, but maybe predominantly men that do put their hand up. And I think that that comes to being in the environment. And this goes back to this idea of like, what's failure being in the environment where I am more likely to put my hand up. If there's a culture of safety, psychological safety that allows me to try things and if they don't work, where if there's a culture that's only focused on outcomes.

Yep. Then it's really hard for me to put my hand up. This is so fascinating. So I'm on, I'm the executive sponsor for our leading women's community here at Softchoice. And all of my teams have always been highly diverse and highly inclusive because you create higher performance. And so we need to make that culture feel like it's okay to raise your hand and do it.

It's the sign of a high performing team. Yeah. I think we're actually in a bit of an inflection point in, um, in diversity thinking where we're moving away from backgrounds. Yes. Right. And we're moving towards experiences. So we're looking for a diversity of experience. Now the diversity of experience and backgrounds [00:14:00] often correlate.

Sure. Right. So, but I think that the, you know, the importance of the diversity of experience and a team is really important. It's demonstrated over and over again, that the challenge is not being a diverse team isn't sufficient, right? You need good team dynamics that let that diversity express itself and to let counter.

Thoughts be welcoming, which is really hard to let thoughts that go against your culture and your view. And by the way, you know, In technology, even harder, there are almost ideologies that exist, right? And so having someone that speaks against the ideology can be really difficult. Right. Um, and so like having diversity is good, but having team processes and culture that allow that diversity to be expressed, I think is really important.

And I think this comes back to the whole premise of this dialogue, which is the leaders are responsible for setting the tone and showing what good looks like. And if they're not modeling it, there's no way that they can then ask people under them or around them to behave differently than they're [00:15:00] behaving.

And so it's fundamentally set by the tone of, of how you do leadership. Now, you said earlier, the importance of delegation when you're a CEO or in sport, and it is fundamentally tough to do because you've, you've almost got to allow the individual. That's whether it's your assistant coach or somebody that's on your team to do it differently than you may do it.

And so I wonder if you have any, um, tips or experiences that you can share around how powerful it is to delegate, even if it's like a scary thing to do. Like, how do you navigate that mentally as a leader? The, the challenge that you have is you have to keep a duality in your head. Always. I'm giving this to this person, not only to get it done, but also for their growth and development.

And when you have that growth and development mindset, then you, then, then, then you're able to handle things that don't go well. So that's sort of number one. And then the second thing that I think is really critical is delegations contextual. So if I'm going to delegate to you and you're very [00:16:00] experienced, That's very different than me delegating to you when it's your first day on the job.

Yes. You know, I, I, I work with people that I want to be a servant leader. I'm like, okay, it doesn't matter what you want to be. It matters, what does your team need to perform? Oh, I love that. So if your team needs to perform, needs you to be direct, you should be direct. There isn't one model that works. And so when you're delegating, if you have someone that's new and they've never done this before, you need to give them a small piece.

You need to explain it to them. You need to monitor them in that case. If it's mutual, the behavior can look like micromanagement, but as long as it's done mutually and done for the benefit of the individual. It isn't micromanagement, it's support. I love that. Now, if I did that with a really experienced person, the same behaviors, if I delegated exactly the same way with someone who's been doing the job for five years, that's micromanagement.

Yes. Right. That demonstrates a lack of trust. If I just send the information and I expect the inexperienced person to do it, that's not being a great leader. No. Right. That's being absent. I need to be [00:17:00] more engaged. So the two things is thinking about that duality of getting it done and that growth, and then being contextual about how you do it.

I think those are the two critical things to be effective. It feels like it's, um, there's an element of what you just said, that's about setting people up for success. And you know, just like you have a sports team, I'm not going to treat every player the same because there are different places in maturity, skill sets, mindset, all that.

And so you don't want to put somebody That's really good at X in a position where they're always using Y and never using X. And then they feel bad about themselves and so on and so forth. So I love that. Um, one of the things we talk a lot about at work or within sport is accountability. And I believe you can't have accountability.

You can't hold somebody accountable so it's setting proper expectations. What synergies have you found from your coaching life to business where Expectation setting is the actually the harder thing to do before holding accountability. Like what's the link there? Okay. So I'm going to, um, if I can just share another story, because I think this is really important [00:18:00] because I think accountability and feedback are the two things for a performance culture.

So when I coached at the world cup in 2014, my big focus was literally, I wanted the players to have a transformative experience. And I wanted them to have an experience where they enjoyed it and they were able to, like, you know, be as good as they could be, right? As individuals, the score would take care of itself.

I think we came fifth or sixth in, in 2014. And I realized that, hold on. That's not what the players want. Right. What the players want to do is win. Yes. So I was coaching to my goals, not to their goals. Right. And that was a big enlightening moment. And so I transformed the way I coached. There's two things that I added.

So one was feedback and one was accountability. So the difference between a great culture, the team loves each other and they get on and they have fun. That's a great culture. And a performance culture is the ability to have accountability and feedback. You are absolutely right. Accountability requires explicit expectations.

In the sports world, in [00:19:00] rugby, we video everything they do. Right. Right. Like everything that they do, we video, we can show it to them. We can sit down to them. We can like break down what they're doing on video. We can give them stats and we can hold them accountable to the expectation of their role. Right.

Because we have that. We, we don't often have that in business. We don't have that ability to have that data. So what we have to do is we have to make sure that we have a similar rabbit. So if I ask someone to draw a rabbit, right, like what would they draw? And this is like, this goes back. There's a delegation issue here, which is like, so I say, Aaron, I want you to draw a rabbit and you draw a bug's bunny.

I'm like, I didn't mean that kind of rabbit. I meant like a real life rabbit. Like, why aren't you doing what I asked you to do? Oh, Aaron's not a good performer. Like, hold on, right? The best way to do it in business is I ask Aaron, I say, Aaron, I want you to draw a rabbit. What would that rabbit look like for you?

You know, this Aaron in sport, we call it check for understanding. Yep. Right. I need to check for understanding. Right. So I need to set the expectation and then I need to check for understanding. You [00:20:00] know, when you tell me what I expect from you, then it does two things. One is it enables me to hold you accountable because we have clear expectations.

But the second thing is even better if you tell me what it is and how you're going to do it and when you're going to do it by. You now own it. This is like one of the twists. So in rugby, this is how you have to do it. You have to have them own it. What we would do is have them watch the video. We would have them look at the data and we would have them come and say, okay, here's my analysis of myself.

And then we would help them understand whether that was right or not, but they have to own it in business. We don't have to own it. So if I'm delegating something to you and I say, Aaron, I need you to do ABC and I need it by Friday. I own that deadline. Now I have to monitor you. You might walk away from that delegation and be like, there's no way I can do it by Friday.

But if I ask you Aaron, when can you do it by? And you tell me it's Friday. Now that's your deadline. That's not my deadline. And so ownership and accountability really come hand in hand. So if I can get my team [00:21:00] to tell me what they're going to do, easy for me to hold them accountable. When I tell them very, very hard.

I love this. And, and it is seeking clarity that are we on the same page? So we talked a lot about different elements that make a leader or a coach successful. And one of the things we haven't talked about is one of the tools in your toolkit, which is technology. And I'm curious how you have seen technology grow and its impact on you as a coach or as business leaders in their ability to lead.

Yeah. I mean, I think at least on the coaching side, technology is really expressed in data and the ability for you to both capture and have access and analyze data. You know, I've seen this in my career. I started coaching in 1994, kind of like retired in 2017. And by 2017, we were measuring everything, everything the players were doing.

We were getting resting heart rates when they woke up, like there's a whole bunch of stuff that you're doing. And I think what the data does on the coaching side is I think that it allows you to test. Your coaching eye, right? So when I look at [00:22:00] performance, I'll look at a play, and this is how we did selections, right?

We would choose like, Hey, here's how we're gonna select. And then we would say, does the data support or not support that selection? Interesting. And if the data supports that selection, okay, we're done. If the data doesn't support that selection, then we go back and say, okay, let's go spend some more time with the data, go back and look at the film some more.

So I think the technology of the ability to be able to manage large sets of data and being able to leverage that. And then eventually to make it predictive, like we kind of got to the point, we would know that a player after 70 minutes or after 60 minutes, their performance would drop. Interesting, right?

And actually we didn't do it on time, but it was the number of contacts they had. So the number of like, if we can measure the number of contacts they have. So being able to be predictive to be able to make that choice, I think is, is really important, you know, on, on the leadership side, I think we're beginning to see the impact of generative AI and, and, and the impact that that has, I actually think that generative AI is going to democratize executive coaching.

Interesting. So. Right now, for me to go work with someone, I'm [00:23:00] expensive, but what if I could coach a generative AI coaching bot, to actually coach the way I coach? That's interesting. Could they then not coach everyone at the organization? And could it be just in time? I think that that is going to be a really big impact on my industry.

And in fact, I've already started to have some conversations with some groups because we have the authentic leadership model. So you've got a model and a framework and you've got questions, but you've got the foundation of something that's really replicable. And so I think that that is going to change the way that we lead, and it's going to change the way we interact with our people.

I love that. Aaron, I'm gonna ask you a question. Yeah. Why do you think leaders feel the need to be fully developed to their team? What is it that makes them feel like I can't still be growing? There's two answers to this and it's one of the reasons I got into coaching. The first answer to this is it's ego driven.

Um, because I am of a higher stature than you and, and I'm your leader, it's my job to always [00:24:00] be right. And it's your job to gain all my learnings. There's an element of ego that is a part of this. I think the, the other part of it is some level of, they think they own the outcome, not the process to get the outcome.

And so they're not thinking about like the mindset for me whenever I take on a new role is I want to be replaceable and irrelevant in two years, which means that I have to push everything down to my people, my team, my assistant coaches, doesn't matter where it I want to be useless. Because that's going to afford me growth.

It's the ones that want to hold on to everything. It creates this, this horrible environment. So that's, that's my take on it. I agree with both of those. I think those are both true. And I think that there's a self identity challenge. And you find this actually with athletes that you work with, the great athletes that come up and probably come into your under 21, they were the best player on their team for the whole of their lives.

And now they come up And now all of a sudden they're not the best player. Yeah. Like their self identity has been, I've always been the best player. [00:25:00] And so I think that there's a challenge with people that are successful, that reinforces the identity that I'm successful. It's a natural thing. Um, I've never really thought about it.

And I think that that's the challenge that we have. So I think there's a self identity that like, I'm, I'm successful. I am the leader. My identity is wrapped up in the leader. And therefore failure is really difficult for me to deal with. So a lot of the discussion we've had around expectation setting accountability, this all leads to this, this construct of purpose.

And we've had a lot of conversation at soft choice over the last year around our purpose. And I actually, my purpose at work is very aligned to my purpose. I tell my team every year when I first kick off our season and we try to identify our identity for us as a group. And I want to tell a really brief story.

It was my favorite year of coaching and it was in 2021 and we decided to do something different with our team. In tryouts, we shared our purpose and the purpose for the team. And my personal purpose is [00:26:00] your job is to make everyone around you better. And if you do that, you'll have a team of people making you better.

Not just yourself. We have to create an environment in which everyone, no matter their role, can bring their full self into the space to be successful. And then there's an expectation of pushing past acceptable, a past fine, and you want to drive for the remarkable. So those are the three things that we stated.

And we only pick players that. played that way. And we ended up getting rid of our top three goal scorers because they didn't fit that mindset of team over individual. And we ended up winning the Ontario Provincials that year without a single player being in the top 20 of scoring. And every team that we played against said, you guys were relentless.

I'm getting chills down my spine listening to this story, Aaron. Keep going. But this is like an awesome story. It was like my favorite year. And part of it was the delegation of, we had three captains on the team and we let them run the run the room 30 minutes before every game. We didn't speak. We use practice just like rugby to teach the captains how to then run the team.

[00:27:00] And it was my favorite year of sport ever. And it had to do with aligning on a common vision and purpose. So I'm curious what your purpose is and the importance you have found in your world as well as both business and coaching. Yeah, it's interesting. I'll, I'll start with just saying people ask me if I miss coaching and I miss the relationships.

I miss seeing athletes fulfill their goals, right? I miss that, but I don't really miss coaching. And I think that's because my purpose is I really want to have a positive impact on other people's lives. That's what coaching rugby was for me. Like, you know, if you remember the story about the 2014 Olympics, like, so World Cup was like nothing about winning.

I want to have an impact on their lives. And I'm fortunate enough that my job allows me to do that. So I actually get like my purpose fulfilled in what I do. I think purpose is really critical. You know, in my book, leadership shop, we talk about the authentic leadership model and the reason why it's authentic is it's yours.

It's, and it's based in things that only you have, so no one's leadership model is the same, and it's authentic because it [00:28:00] starts with things like your purpose. So I actually think purpose is fundamental to how you lead and how you live. And I don't necessarily believe you have to have clarity of purpose.

But I think you'll find yourself, like if you ask people to reflect, when I work with leaders and I asked them to reflect, they pretty quickly understood. Oh yeah. These were the times when I felt the best about myself. These were the times when I were fulfilled. That's how you can fulfill your purpose.

And these are questions that are in the book. You can actually discover it yourself. And I think, so I think your individual purpose is good and it's, it's sustainable because if you're doing things that are aligned to your purpose, it fills your emotional tank. If you're doing things that aren't aligned to your purpose, it doesn't.

And I'll just finish the 2014 story to 2017. So in 2017, we went there to win. It was a performance culture. It was less about the experience of the athlete and the potential for growth and more about performance on the field. And I think I probably use the sports psychologist at the 2017 world cup more than the players, because that did not align to my [00:29:00] purpose.

So for me, I needed support. It wasn't sustainable 2014. I never talked to the sports psychologist. Cause it was where I felt I could be fulfilled 2017. And you know, this Aaron, like coaching is like pretty high pressure. I actually think the next generation of wellness and sport is coach wellness. I think we've got to a point where there's an acceptance of player wellness, but I don't think we understand the challenge and even the damage that's done to coaches.

And so in 2017, like almost every day I would go for walks with the sports psychologist. And it was only more recently that I realized, Oh, it's a purpose issue. It's the fact that my purpose was not aligned in 2017, but it was in 2014. So I think understanding your purpose and then understanding how it can be fulfilled in the role that you have, and it's not everything, right?

It's not a hundred percent of your time, but trying to find more ways to fulfill it, I think really will help with wellness and will really help with sustainability. And I know we haven't spoken a lot about, um, the work that you've done over the last year, and I think your book is recent. It just came out, uh, this year.

It did. It just [00:30:00] came out this year. Yeah. That's very exciting. I will absolutely be digging into that if, if everything we just talked about today is in that book. So maybe you can give the readers a little bit of an overview of what they can expect out of the leadership shock. So leadership shock, and we've kind of talked about it a little bit, Aaron, here is something that I think we all experience.

It's when your calendar is crazy. It's where you don't feel like you can be, your team is confused, like your boss is off. You just don't feel like you can be yourself. And so it. It's a form of shock. The way your body goes into shock, like the blood pumps, you breathe, but you can't actually do anything.

What leaders find themselves in that situation. And often it's acute. It happens for a short period of time around a crisis and then you get out of it. But sometimes it's actually the way you think it should be. And so the, the book. Helps you think through some fundamental aspects of leadership and then helps you identify where you should spend your time and how you want to lead in a system called the authentic leadership model.

And I'll tell you this, Aaron, the book is written for me to finish it. Like I never finish [00:31:00] any, any leadership books. I get like a halfway through it and I'm like, I got it. I understand what you're doing. So the book is a fable. It's a story. It's a newly appointed CEO named Michael. It's an amalgamation of clients.

It's his story. And it's his story about how he becomes the CEO and how that role becomes unsustainable and how he gets out of it. And I'm not going to tell you what it is, but there's a twist at the end. So you have to make sure you read the whole of the book. And then the last thing I would say is that within the book, it's kind of like a self help book.

I would say at the end of each book, it's like, Hey, here's this part of the model. Think through it. Here are the questions that you should think through. So that's the leadership shop book. It has a lot of what we've talked about in it. And a lot of the way I think, and as well as some of the things that I brought from sport into businesses in the book.

I can't wait to read that. Where could they find it? Like if they want to hear more about you and your journey you've been on or get access to your book, what do you recommend? There's a small little corner shop called Amazon. Um, you can find it on Amazon. You can do that, but you can also find me. Pete Steinberg.

[00:32:00] com. We have a newsletter where I send out things about team performance and leadership shock, and then, you know, love connecting with people on LinkedIn. That's amazing. Uh, thank you very much for joining us today, Peter. And hopefully we can have this chat again. And even if it's not on a podcast, I think there's dialogue for me.

I've enjoyed it immensely. Yeah. I mean, next time I'm up in Toronto, I'll give you a call. I would love to have a coffee with you. That would be great. Whether you're a seasoned executive. or aspiring to lead your team to the next big win. It's clear that the principles of leadership in sport can profoundly impact the strategies we employ in business.

Pete's journey from the rugby field to the boardroom teaches us the universal challenges and triumphs of leading with intention. And as a coach and a leader, I love today's conversation. The importance of purpose, having a vision that motivates people, the secret of focusing on journey and activities, Not the results to drive sustainable business growth.

The importance of feedback for mutual personal growth for both the leader and the team member. The power of expectation setting and having a [00:33:00] game plan so your people can execute without you. And that we all experience leadership shock. But it's how we lean into the authentic leadership model that will drive us towards success.

I feel like we've just scratched the surface on this topic and the impacts technology has on leadership. So who knows? Maybe we'll see another episode where we dive deeper. Thank you for joining us today, and we'll see you in two weeks. And if you like what you're hearing, please consider leaving a review wherever you listen to your podcasts.

The Catalyst is brought to you by Softchoice, a leading North American technology solution provider written and produced by Angela Cope, Felipe Dimas, and Braden Banks in partnership with Pilgrim Content Marketing.