After two decades placing senior leaders at global firms, one pattern holds: the executives who thrive under pressure were almost always competitive athletes.
I am Employee #1 at ZRG Partners, now a top-10 global executive search firm. Over 25 years I've advised CEOs, founders, private equity partners, and boards on the most consequential decisions they make — who to put in the chair. I've interviewed thousands of executives. I've placed hundreds in roles that determined the trajectory of companies and careers.
And I can tell you with confidence: the athletic background is not a coincidence. It's a signal.
The Question I Always Ask
Early in my career I started asking every candidate a version of the same question: "Tell me about a time when you were at your absolute limit — physically or mentally — and chose to keep going." It's not on any standard interview framework. I added it myself because the answers it produces are unlike anything else in the process.
The candidates who give the most compelling answers to that question are almost always athletes. Not always current athletes. But people for whom competition, physical challenge, and voluntary suffering are part of their identity — past or present.
The ability to operate at your limit without quitting is the most transferable skill in business. And it's almost impossible to teach. But it can be trained.
What Athletes Know That MBAs Don't Teach
How to Lose Well
Every serious athlete has lost. Not just fallen short — been beaten, been humbled, been forced to look at the gap between where they are and where they want to be. The ones who become great learn to use that information without being destroyed by it. In business, this manifests as the leader who can hear hard feedback, absorb a bad quarter, or survive a failed product launch and come back with clarity instead of bitterness.
Process Over Outcome
Elite athletes don't control race day. They control training. The work, the consistency, the small improvements compounding over months and years. The best executives I've placed think the same way — they're obsessed with inputs, not outcomes. They build systems, not hope.
Team as Force Multiplier
Even individual sport athletes — cyclists, skiers, runners — compete within teams. They know that the right people around them, supporting the right roles at the right time, is what unlocks individual excellence. This translates directly to how they build and lead organizations. They're not threatened by talent. They're energized by it.
The Long Game
Athletes understand periodization — the idea that peak performance requires cycles of stress and recovery, intensity and rest. The best executives apply this same intuition to careers and organizations. They don't sprint indefinitely. They know when to push, when to recover, and how to build toward a peak that matters.
What I Look for Now
When I'm evaluating a senior leader today, I'm not looking for someone who runs marathons or rides centuries (though many of them do). I'm looking for evidence that they have voluntarily done hard things — that they have chosen difficulty when they could have chosen comfort, and that they have a framework for doing so again.
That framework is what I built Executive Athletes around in 2010. It's what brought 18,000 people to the LinkedIn community, 200 podcast episodes, and events across six cities. And it's what I'm rebuilding now — because the need for this conversation hasn't gone away. If anything, in a world that has gotten measurably softer and more distracted, the competitive advantage of the athletic executive is larger than it's ever been.
Hire the athlete. Develop the athlete in you. The rest follows.