Sir Chris Hoy: gold-medal leadership tips from an Olympic champion

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The cycling superstar visited our new London office to explain how resilience, motivation and embracing change are just as important in business as in sport

What's the connection between Sir Chris Hoy MBE, the six-time Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist, and Intertrust Group?

More generally, what can businesses learn from Hoy, the second most decorated Olympic cyclist of all time, and now a British racing driver?

The answer is a lot, even for those who aren't interested in his insights on track cycling technique. Because Hoy's incredible achievements prove he has much to teach us about resilience and leadership.

In his recent talk at Intertrust Group's new London office, one key takeaway was about embracing change. Hoy won his first Olympic gold in the kilo time trial at the 2004 Athens games. He trained hard for the same event in Beijing in 2008, only for it to be removed from the Games.

This left him deflated, but he had to adapt to move forward and compete in other events. It became a defining point in his career, and in Beijing Hoy became the first Briton in 100 years to claim three golds in one Olympics.

Hoy stressed the importance of not standing still - even when you achieve success - and emphasised that doing things that worked in the past is no guarantee of future success.

Your competitors will train harder and learn new strategies, and Olympic events can change. Hoy had to keep pushing himself in new directions and strive for continuous improvement.

Getting the mindset to deal with change

Change can feel uncomfortable: Hoy worked with Professor Steve Peters, a psychiatrist, to reprogramme his mindset. In so doing, he learnt to view change positively.

Hoy credits Peters' book The Chimp Paradox with providing him a mind management programme that helped him to be a winner.

It was not conventional for a professional cyclist to team up with a psychiatrist, but it's a brilliant example of learning from different fields. At Intertrust Group, we strongly believe you can learn from other industries and disciplines.

There is evidence that this works from across business and sport. For instance, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola spent a year in the US watching NFL and NBA (American football and basketball) training sessions to learn new strategies for football.

And Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, has attributed critical lessons he learnt about leadership to playing high school sports in India. Meanwhile, Richard Branson has said playing tennis taught him how to move on from failures and focus on the future.

Hoy also spoke about breaking a goal down into a series of tasks to make it more manageable. If you visualise a task as climbing a mountain, it can seem overwhelming. But splitting the process into steps can help.

Say it's 6am and your alarm goes off, but it's cold and dark outside. Getting out of bed is your first goal. The next is to shower and have breakfast. Then it's driving to the gym. Instead of thinking about the entire gym session - which may seem unappealing - break this down too: five bench presses, five laps and so on.

This is a great motivational tool and reduces the risk of giving up and not reaching the top of the mountain. In a business context, this mindset can be applied whenever a large task or project seems daunting.

At Intertrust Group, we will take this lesson on board in our transformation work.

The importance of resilience

Hoy also spoke about the importance of resilience in dealing with change and being a leader. Resilience has been much discussed over the past 18 months as individuals and companies push through the pandemic. It's been a key attribute for those businesses that have survived Covid and successfully transitioned to new ways of working.

Life and work have their ups and downs, and change happens all the time. Learning to be resilient in the face of adversity means you can overcome it, progress and lead others.

It's also crucial to understand your team's resilience levels. This has been especially true during lockdowns. Everyone responds differently and being aware of how colleagues are coping means you can support them better and work together as a team.

A final takeaway was how much motivation and dedication is required to be a world-class athlete. Hoy's fitness doesn't just come naturally - he has to work at it. In business, some people may seem natural leaders, but to inspire others and grow a business takes a lot of behind-the-scenes effort and dedication.

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