The competitive edge

Sport provides a whole host of metaphors for business success, none more potent than the ones that attach themselves to Formula One. Beat your competitors, and you're the driver taking the chequered flag or climbing the podium. Getting your team working together can be as gratifying as watching a well-orchestrated pit stop. Nobody understands the benefits of applying these metaphors to the business world better than Sir Jackie Stewart.

After a Formula One career that saw him become world champion three times, Sir Jackie used some of the lessons he had learned at the wheel to establish a successful career in business. Lessons, he insists, that are there for other people to learn from as well.

"There's no question that business could learn from a sport like Formula One," he says. "Success in both fields is about being focused, showing attention to detail, making sure that you have the right team around you and performing at a consistently high level. I'm amazed that more companies don't call on the skills of successful sports people. Nelson Piquet now has a thriving telecommunicatrions business. Niki Lauda started his own airline. That's no coincidence."

Except that more and more companies are doing just that. In the past, sports stars would have been brought on for corporate events, asked to present an award and perhaps to tell a few ribald dressing room anecdotes. Talk to any modern-day sports star, however, and it soon becomes obvious just how much more they and their coaches have to offer.

Frank Hadden was confirmed as the coach of the Scottish rugby union side in September 2005, after recording victories over Romania and the Barbarians. He described the appointment as "the ultimate honour", and soon justified it by leading his resurgent team into their strongest performance in the RBS Six Nations since they won the final Five Nations in 1999. Scotland recorded home wins over France and England, but their meeting with Italy in Rome provided the unexpected bonus of their first away win in the tournament in four years. Despite his obvious passion for the game, Hadden has the sort of pragmatic approach to his role that shareholders would look for in a good CEO.

"It's my belief that unless you enjoy your job, you're not going to maximise your potential," he says. "When I took over, the first thing I did was stress to the players how important it is that they look forward to training and to representing Scotland. The job of the management team is to do everything they can to get those players in the best possible shape to win for their country."

Substitute 'country' for 'company' and you've got one of the truisms of modern business administration. Consultancies have now sprung up all over the country and applying some of the principles of sports psychology to business has become a business in its own right, which is good news for people like Professor Graham Jones of the Lane4 consultancy.

"Performance is performance, no matter who you are or what you do," explains Professor Graham Jones. "My background is sports psychology so I've worked with the Great Britain Olympic Team, professional golfers and the Welsh rugby team. At Lane4 we apply some of the lessons learned in those elite sports to business so I've also worked with Coca-Cola, Sainsbury's and other top companies."

Professor Jones is one of the founders of Lane4, along with former Olympic swimmer Adrian Moorhouse. The gold medallist has said sports psychology "made the ultimate difference" to his career - indeed the consultancy takes its name from the lane that Moorhouse was in when he won gold at the 1988 Olympics.

Adapting the sports psychology approach to the office may conjure up images of hapless sales staff being forced to scrum down in the middle of the office, but the approach is much more cerebral and starts much higher up the corporate food chain.

"We aim to work with the most senior people in an organisation first," says Professor Jones. "This ties in with some of the issues in sport where you have a club that's struggling. Often the issues don't lie with the team but with the management, so we'll look at the environment they're creating. Sports teams plan down to the smallest detail and for a range of 'what ifs'. That's a vital lesson for any business to learn."

It's an approach that Frank Hadden endorses. "The psychology of certainty is very important," he says. "In particular, getting your team familiar with the structure of the working week so they know exactly what's going to happen. I'm also inclined to give positive feedback. When we're debriefing players, for each negative situation I'll point out the world-class things the players have done as well. It's important not to focus too much on weaknesses as we know that we have some great strengths."

Professor Jones agrees that this focus on achievement is another area where business can learn from sport. "You find that organisations tend to analyse failure," he explains. "But what many sports performers do well is analyse success and understand how to build on it. We all know examples of one-hit wonders - players who become the world champion one year but you never hear from them again. That's because they don't realise how they did it so they can never replicate it."

This uncertainty is also common in high-achieving CEOs who have sudden crises of confidence, and it's this relationship between Lane4 and the CEO that comes closest to replicating Professor Jones' relationship with the elite athletes he's worked with.

"There is a lot of commonality," he says. "When you get people behind closed doors, even people at the top of their sport, they'll want to talk to you about confidence. CEOs are no different, and in situations like that I provide them with an outlet. Several senior people I've worked with have said they feel as though they're waiting to be 'found out'. Like someone who's become a world champion, they suddenly look at where they've got to and what they've done and they start thinking 'How did I get here?'. It then becomes about building their understanding and their belief in themselves."

Learning how to deal with pressure is another skill that translates from the sports field to the boardroom. The CEO who finds the share price in freefall and the pundits sharpening the knives on the business pages has to develop the same resilience as the club manager barracked by his home crowd and vilified in the sports section.

One of the things Professor Jones works on with leaders is getting them to step up and lead rather then getting bogged down with details. "Clive Woodward has received criticism from people who said that he didn't actually coach the England rugby team. But he had the self-belief to bring in people who were experts and then he led that environment. That's a huge learning point," he says.

It would be easy to dismiss the growing corporate fascination with the insights provided by sports psychology as a gimmick, similar to the 'horse whispering' sessions that made an appearance on Manchester Business School's MBA course. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Lane4's approach works.

The consultancy was called into work with Coca-Cola Enterprises, the organisation responsible for marketing, producing and distributing Coca-Cola's products in the UK, after an employee survey found low levels of confidence in its leadership team and an above-average rate of staff turnover.

Four years and an intensive programme of workshops and coaching sessions later, a subsequent survey reported a 60 per cent fall in voluntary staff turnover, as well as improvements of up to 50 per cent in employee trust. Lane4's work with the company won it an award, demonstrating just how successful the approach is, no matter how far beyond the original principles of sports psychology it's applied. Frank Hadden readily admits that financial pressures have made it impossible for his Scotland team to employ their own sports psychologist, but as the coach already has a degree in psychology, it's clear they don't particularly need one.

"I prefer to talk about two key things - confidence and self-belief," he says. "You challenge the players in training and set them achievable goals so they gain confidence from being successful. But the best way to instil confidence is by winning matches and that has a massive effect on your psyche. Winning by a single point and losing by a single point are poles apart in terms of self-belief. Whatever you do to build confidence, nothing compares to winning."

You might never get to taste the type of victory that comes with sinking that putt at The Open, watching your team seize victory in the Rugby World Cup final, masterminding a famous return to form for your national team as Frank Hadden has, or becoming a three-time Formula One world champion like Sir Jackie Stewart. But even if your arena is the domestic boardroom rather than a packed stadium, there's no reason to change your approach or limit your aspirations.

"In many ways, business isn't any different from sport," Sir Jackie says. "It doesn't matter how much money you have or how much success you've had before. Whether you're in sport or business, you've got to deliver today. Even if you've got an MBA from Harvard, that won't make you a great performer. It's down to you to go beyond what they taught you at business school. Take the lessons you learned, the skills that you've got - and drive them harder."