After two decades placing senior leaders at global firms, one pattern holds: the executives who thrive under pressure were almost always competitive athletes.
I'm Employee #1 at ZRG Partners, now a top-10 global executive search firm. For 25 years I've advised CEOs, founders, private equity partners, and boards on the most consequential decision they make: who goes in the chair. Thousands of interviews. Hundreds of placements that changed 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 the same question: "Tell me about a time you were at your absolute limit, physically or mentally, and chose to keep going." It's not in any interview framework. I added it because the answers tell me more than anything else in the process.
The candidates with the best answers are almost always athletes. Not always current athletes. But people who made competition, physical challenge, and voluntary suffering part of who they are, 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 stare 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, that's the leader who can hear hard feedback, absorb a bad quarter, or survive a failed 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 that compound over months and years. The best executives I've placed think the same way. They obsess over inputs, not outcomes. They build systems, not hope.
Team as Force Multiplier
Even individual sport athletes, cyclists, skiers, runners, compete within teams. They know the right people around them, in the right roles at the right time, is what unlocks individual excellence. That 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. Peak performance requires cycles of stress and recovery, intensity and rest. The best executives apply the same thinking to careers and organizations. They don't sprint forever. They know when to push, when to recover, and how to build toward a peak that matters.
What I Look for Now
When I evaluate a senior leader today, I'm not looking for someone who runs marathons or rides centuries, though plenty of them do. I'm looking for evidence that they've voluntarily done hard things. That they chose difficulty when they could have chosen comfort, and that they'd do it again.
That's 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. It's what I'm rebuilding now, because the need for this conversation hasn't gone away. If anything, in a world that's gotten softer and more distracted, the edge of the athletic executive is bigger than it's ever been.
Hire the athlete. Develop the athlete in you. The rest follows.