Peak newsletter 🧠 | This is an excerpt from The Athletic’s weekly newsletter covering the mental side of sports. Sign up here to receive the Peak newsletter directly in your inbox.
I’ve come to the conclusion that leadership is both subjective in how it is experienced and applied and objective in the goals it seeks to achieve.
The approaches may differ, the personalities may differ and the environments definitely differ. But if the goals are ultimately the same – developing people, improving skills, success – then it made me wonder: What is the single most important trait a leader should have?
I asked current and former professional athletes across different sports that question. Here are my 11 favorite answers:
Work ethic
Jayden Daniels, Washington Commanders quarterback: As a leader, you can’t have guys follow you if you’re not going out there and putting the work in yourself.
I feel like I can’t ask anybody personally to do stuff that I’m not doing myself. I can’t expect people to come up here and do a walk-through at 6 in the morning if I’m not doing it myself.
Adaptability
Chelsea Gray, Las Vegas Aces guard: Adapting to circumstances. Injuries happen. How can you adapt and make others better?
Adapting within a game when our energy is down, our belief, how do you change people’s perspective and adapt in that way?
(Aces coach) Becky (Hammon) has been great in that regard. Just adapting to the situation. Whether it’s to know to yell, whether to know to give us love, to wrap her arms around us, to give us a break and not see each other, or whether to change the circumstances in certain moments.
Positive character
Charlie Davies, former MLS and USMNT player: The coaches who can remain positive and find positives even when things are going bad, those are the coaches everyone wants to fight for and play for.
Plays to their strengths
Jack Drury, Nashville Predators center: A good leader bases the way they lead on their personality and who they are and what the team needs.
The good leaders I’ve been around have been unique. I’d say the two captains I’ve played under in the NHL, Jordan Staal and Gabriel Landeskog, were both incredible captains and I think are — around the league — looked at as two of the best.
There are certainly some similarities in that they lead by example, they practice what they preach, things of that nature, but I also think they’re two very different people. And that manifested itself in the way each of them led.
Landy is a very outgoing guy, very friendly, very positive, and he could be more of a vocal leader at times when it was necessary for the team.
Staal could be a little bit more reserved, but when he did say something, it carried a ton of weight, because you knew how much he meant it and how much he felt the team needed to hear it.
Three pro athletes have the same favorite mental advice
Elise Devlin
Consistency of who they are
Jeff Francoeur, former MLB player: When I played for Bobby Cox with the Atlanta Braves, you could walk in his office and you could not tell if we won five games in a row or lost five games in a row. He was the same dude every day.
When you have that, man, you have players who want to play for you and want to learn. But when you have a leader who is one day happy and one day sad and it’s nothing but results-based, are you going to want to follow that person? Probably not.
When I played for the Kansas City Royals and Dayton Moore was the general manager, the reason he was my favorite dude is he’d come down in the locker room and ask about my family: Hey Jeff, how’s Catie? How are the kids?
He didn’t ask about baseball, even when I was going good. He wouldn’t come down and go: Man, you’re having a great week. It was always something else.
That consistency is so important.
Lo’eau LaBonta, Kansas City Current midfielder: A leader and a captain cannot always just choose the players’ side or the staff’s side. There has to be some give and take.
But if you’re fair all the way through, when you’re being very honest — which sometimes looks like an uncomfortable truth and you’re not always agreeing with someone — but if you’re consistently doing that, your voice is going to carry more weight.
Accountability
Roquan Smith, Baltimore Ravens linebacker: Taking ownership of anything and never pointing the blame, never pointing a finger and always figuring out what you can do better.
Even if it was another teammate’s job, I would never throw them under the bus. I still would take accountability for it, take ownership, and say, “Yeah, it’s me. Put it on my back.”
I have had a lot of tremendous coaches like that, as well as my mom. Maybe there was something that me and my brother did early on that wasn’t really a great representation of the core and moral beliefs that she taught us. Then I would hear her saying to the neighbors, “OK, yeah, granted they did do that, but put this on me. I should have taught them better.”
I think it creates a positive environment, and it allows individuals to think, Hey, we’re all human. We are all going to make mistakes.
You’re not in this together without accountability.
Jason Kelce’s favorite piece of mental advice
Elise Devlin
Delegating
Mikaela Shiffrin, gold medal skier: Mostly to know when your plate is full and to know your team around you, so you can play to their strengths and pass off responsibilities that will be the most effective use of their time. And then you can optimize the production of the team as a whole.
Authenticity
Zaza Pachulia, former NBA player: Authenticity lays the foundation for any leader or role model because it makes it easier to build trust.
Trust is such an important thing. It moves the train, moves the team, moves the business. Without trust, it’s hard to get from point A to point B. And authenticity creates that trust.
Steph Curry, for example. Imagine having this kind of leader, where for 16 years in the league, he’s going 100 miles per hour, every single drill, every pass. It inspires you, motivates you, pushes you.
It doesn’t let you cut corners, because your leader goes 100 miles per hour, and he’s been doing it for every single practice, every single day, every season, all these years.
And nothing, nothing is better than that.
Conviction
Claire Liu, pro tennis player: It’s really important for me to believe my coach and fully buy into what they’re thinking.
Sometimes I wouldn’t agree with what my coaches were saying, but because they believed it so much and they were so bought into it, I was so bought into it. It almost didn’t matter what they were saying; I was still doing well because I was fully on the train.
There are so many different playing styles and techniques. I feel like people think, If I have this perfect technique for this stroke, then everything will be fine. But it’s not even that. It’s so mental that if you just fully buy in, it doesn’t matter if technically it’s right or wrong. It could still totally work for you.
That’s the biggest thing that you need as an athlete to make it: that belief. If you have someone who doubles that belief in you, that really helps.
Be a chameleon
Austin Hedges, Cleveland Guardians catcher: I have a bunch of different masks to wear.
Sometimes it might be a little bit more soft-toned. It might be a little bit more loving. There might be another person where it’s a little more fiery. You talk to people about what their goals are. (There are) people who want to make a lot of money for their family, or they want to have a lot of personal success. I want to be talking to them more from their perspective.
I’ve had some conversations with young players in this game, and in those conversations, I don’t really know them very well. Something might happen on the field where they need a little bit of guidance. I go into that conversation, and what I do is kind of throw out a few ideas.
I’m just reading their body language to see which one of these things really registers with them. What actually motivates them to want to be great? I look for a nod of the head, eyes get wide, maybe a lean forward. That’ll tell me, “Oh, that! That version of motivation or inspiration hits home for this individual person.”
I’ll just dive deeper into that to help make whatever point I’m trying to make.
— Jayson Jenks contributed reporting
