What Sports Have Taught Me as an IT Leader
What can a 10 km race teach a leader about motivating a team? Why can playing football with clients make difficult conversations easier? And how do you know when persistence is no longer the right strategy?
In a Global CIO international open talk, seven professionals from IT, business and leadership consulting shared personal experiences from sport and the lessons they apply at work. Their stories explore how leaders build trust, respond to setbacks, support their teams and decide when to keep going or let go.
Participants:
- Moderator: Alisa Plotnikova, Digital Projects and Events Manager, Global CIO
- Zeeshan Noorani, Head of IT, SGS Vostok Limited
- Andrey Ismoilov, IT Project Manager, Ventra IT Solutions
- Anupama Hatti, Head of Programme Delivery, NHS Blood and Transplant
- John Rokorio, Business Manager, HarpKite
- Kushal Kumar Varshney, Head of IT, Juniper Green Energy Limited
- Dr. Jagannath Sahoo, CISO, INOXGFL
- Sudhir Rao, Founder, Vivarta Consulting
Alisa Plotnikova opens the talk and explains why sport belongs in a conversation about IT leadership.
The full version in the IT Leaders Club Global CIO brings together every speaker's position with quotes, including how the panel tells a bad day from a lack of ability and why a leader's health affects the quality of decisions.
Trust that starts on the pitch
Several speakers described how shared sporting experiences can change relationships at work. On the pitch, professional hierarchies become less visible, and people have a chance to connect outside their usual roles. Those connections can matter later, when difficult conversations or organizational changes require trust.
Sudhir Rao, now a leadership coach, worked in India, the UK, France and the US. In the UK, he played corporate league football with clients and saw how relationships built through sport carried over into business.
But when he joined a football game with colleagues in Paris, his arrival as an Indian goalkeeper prompted an unexpected reaction.
How Kushal Kumar Varshney's games with company executives later made change management easier, and why John Rokorio believes corporate sport needs a unique touch, is described in the full material.
When results don't come
The moderator put a practical question to the panel. How do you keep a team motivated when progress stalls? Zeeshan Noorani answered with a story from his years at Decathlon, the French sports retailer, about a 10 km race he expected to quit.
What happens when an IT team faces its own difficult stretch? A leader's response can shape how people deal with setbacks and whether they remain motivated to move forward.
The full version explores how Zeeshan applies these lessons through his Happy IT Team and why Anupama Hatti believes one bad release should not define a team's potential.
Push through or let go?
Persistence is often seen as a leadership strength. But can the determination to finish become a weakness? Andrey Ismoilov, an IT project manager and obstacle course racing instructor, compares a long project to distance running. Sudhir Rao offers a different perspective, questioning whether pushing through is always the right choice.
Dr. Jagannath Sahoo also emphasized the importance of recognizing physical limits. Sudhir extended this idea to projects, raising a difficult question for leaders who have already invested significant time and resources in a goal.
Sudhir's account of a client product that ran far past its deadline and the advice he gave, along with Zeeshan's idea of an exit scenario agreed before a project starts, are available in the IT Leaders Club Global CIO.
Conclusion
The stories show that sport offers more than lessons in discipline and endurance. It creates situations where trust, teamwork, setbacks and difficult choices become impossible to ignore. For IT leaders, the value lies in recognizing similar challenges at work, from supporting people through difficult periods to understanding when persistence may no longer serve the goal.
The speakers agreed that sport teaches leadership mostly through people, by building trust and by showing how to carry a team through a hard stretch. Where they differed was the price of persistence and the point at which a leader should stop.
What happened when Sudhir stopped training, and how did it change his approach to leadership? What does delegation have to do with a leader's well-being? The full material in the IT Leaders Club Global CIO explores these questions, along with lessons the participants believe no business book can teach.