The Difference Between Tenure and Mastery

A LinkedIn post comparing how athletes train vs. how executives train struck a nerve. Here's what the pushback taught us.

"Successful Olympic athletes have coaches. You don't even get to the Olympics without one." ~ Tom Willis & Brad Zimmerman, The Great Engagement

A few weeks ago, our partner Kevin Davis shared a graphic on LinkedIn comparing how professional athletes spend their time versus how corporate leaders spend theirs. Athletes: roughly 90% training, 10% performing. Corporate leaders? Almost the inverse — 95% performing, 5% training. (Read the original post here — and the follow-up where Kevin worked through the pushback.)

It struck a nerve. Thousands of reactions. Hundreds of comments. And some sharp pushback worth thinking about.

The strongest critique was this: sports are a kind environment — clear rules, immediate feedback, repeated patterns. Leadership is a wicked environment — ambiguous, complex, with delayed and unclear feedback. You can't copy-paste an athlete's training model into the C-suite.

That's right. And it makes the case stronger, not weaker. If leadership is more complex than professional sports, shouldn't we be more intentional about how we develop it — not less?

What landed hardest was this comment:

"Experience alone doesn't create excellence. It creates repetition." ~ Maureen Metcalf

That's the trap. We confuse tenure with mastery. We assume that ten years of doing the job is the same as ten years of getting better at the job. It isn't. Without deliberate practice, real feedback, and structured reflection, experience just reinforces what's already there — patterns and all.

But here's where systems alone won't save us. In many organizations, the unspoken belief at the top is that ongoing development signals weakness. Senior leaders quietly equate "still learning" with "not ready." Until that belief shifts, no system redesign will hold. People don't follow what's stated in a memo. They follow what's modeled.

So the first development journey worth mapping is your own.

This week, audit one of your "training" investments — a leadership program, an onboarding curriculum, a manager bootcamp. Ask one question: Is this an event, or is this a journey? If it's an event, what would it take to extend it across six months — with practice, coaching, and reflection between sessions? That's the redesign.

One comment on the original post summed it up better than we could:

"We treat leadership like a title, not a craft." ~Kathryn C.

Athletes assume they need coaching. Executives often assume they have arrived. The gap between those two assumptions is where most leadership plateaus live.

Pick up the practice.

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