Leadership lessons from business and sport

Yolanda Collinson develops leaders across elite sport and business. She focuses on helping people reach the highest performance levels by specialising in confidence building and self-leadership. Yolanda does this through executive coaching, facilitation and team development. She’s worked with a portfolio of world leading brands and high-profile clients including the Premier League and was recently named by TeamViewer as one of 200 inspirational women in sport. Whether coaching CEOs in corporate environments or decision-makers in professional sport, Yolanda focuses on how to lead with clarity and confidence.

Hi Yolanda, great to see you. Can you take us to the beginning of what led you to become an executive coach in business and sport? 

Thanks, Mimi, and it’s great to be here. Initially, I was coaching individuals in the corporate world. My entry into sport came from pure curiosity. By writing a thesis years ago about female executive coaches across many industries, I soon saw a gap in the world of elite sport. Arguably professional sport faces extreme pressure, scrutiny and visibility beyond what we might understand in the corporate world. My sense was someone in that space could benefit greatly from executive coaching. A large proportion of my sporting portfolio sits in elite football. I’m in my fifth season as a consultant for the Premier League and I love the variety. I bring business thinking into elite sport, and performance thinking into the business world. I sit comfortably between the two to give my clients both sides and that extra perspective and insight.

What common challenges do you see leaders facing today?

Leaders face many challenges today as they did before in terms of people management and performance. But they now operate with fewer resources, tighter budgets and shorter lead times. Doing more in an intensified world that’s moving at such a fast pace is one of their biggest challenges. The old ways of working can become obsolete really quickly now. You’ve always got to be doing something new, bigger and better than your competitors, and there’s not enough time to think about it all. As a leader, this leaves less time for developing yourself and your teams. The intensity of everything is a new challenge for leaders today.

How does coaching in sports compare to coaching in business? What are the parallels and differences?

Both businesses and sports face some similar challenges such as effective people management and team communication. Improving that can have a considerable impact. But their differences lie in how changes can be implemented. For example, when I work with a CEO of an accounting firm, we can generally implement the required changes within their organisation. But in sport, their structure is more complex. The Director of a Football Academy, for example, won’t have as free rein over what changes can be put in place if the industry doesn’t sign off on it. There are more stakeholders and industry bodies involved in the decision-making. Funding and budgets are affected by performance and ownership structures. Sport tends to focus on short-term to mid-term results, through seasons or cycles. There’s often little point in looking beyond that timeline, as who’s to say who’ll be around in the next football season or Olympic cycle? Whereas in the corporate world, we can talk more mid to long term. There are more robust structures and roles in place, which allow us to have wider organisational conversations. Though admittedly less so, due to how fast things are moving now.

Yolanda is in her fifth football season as a business mentor and consultant to the Premier League.

Do you find women face more unique challenges in leadership roles compared to men?

To be noticed, women have to shout a little louder than their male counterparts. Whether that’s in sport, the boardroom or in other senior roles, depending on the industry. I often hear women say, why wasn’t I selected for that promotion? And I’d ask: did they know you wanted it? What seemed obvious to them because they delivered results might not have been a given if they hadn’t made their intentions known. There’s no room for subtleties. You have to shout a bit louder and be more obvious. You can’t just rely on people noticing you or for your work to speak for itself. You have to make them see you.

More women are visible in leadership roles now – whether in boardrooms or with the broader coverage of women’s sports such as rugby, football and F1 Academy. With more success and visible role models, does that help women with more confidence? 

You don’t necessarily become more confident as you get more successful. In the sporting world, for example, success is often expected. I’ve had a lot of people say to me that when they won a match, it was just a relief. Phew, we did our job and now it’s done. That’s pretty brutal. There isn’t the space to celebrate or gain confidence. So if confidence doesn’t come from an external pull, it can only come from what we have within us. But I do think women have more barriers up internally than men when it comes to confidence. This is rooted in our lived experiences. There lies the place to start, to understand where self-doubt comes from. If we can unpack our inner monologue, it goes a long way in managing our self-belief. Confidence in public comes from doing the work in private.

As part of a visibility campaign of women in sport, Yolanda was recognised as one of 200 inspirational women in sport and had her face put on an F1 Academy racing car for the Formula One Heineken 2025 Dutch Grand Prix.

The stat quote comes from TeamViewer’s Women in Sport Tech report on ‘lessons from sport on unlocking talent and driving innovation.’

How do you help your clients with confidence building or thinking differently?

I’m always conscious not to overload my clients with new ideas and concepts until we’ve made space to let the learning in. Clients arrive with habits, ideas and beliefs. Where did these come from? Are they beliefs we’ve created ourselves? Or were they passed down to us? Often unlearning is more impactful than learning something new. It’s shedding what no longer serves us, then replacing it with something that was missing from our previous thinking. When we do things repeatedly well, we hardly notice that they’re a skill anymore. It’s about being open, curious and deliberate with what gets our attention.

What’s surprised you about some of the leaders you’ve coached? 

I’ve noticed an overwhelming lack of confidence from leaders, even those who are at the top of the tree. Their insecurities and hunger for success have driven them to reach the top. From the conversations I’ve had, many were trying to prove something to themselves or others. So, that’s not confidence. That’s quite the opposite. And the problem with reaching the top is, what happens next? Being at the top isn’t always what they thought it would be. It’s like an Olympian winning a gold medal they’ve worked their whole life for. They win, and it doesn’t feel as good as they thought it would, or they feel lost afterwards and don’t know what to do next. Something was out of alignment, and the expectation of the win was hugely miscalculated. Whilst we strive for success, we need a higher consciousness and to be acutely aware of what else matters.

High-performance environments come with high pressure. How do you help leaders in sport and business with burnout?

Burnout is a real risk for a lot of my clients. I often get them to talk about anything but work. How do they like to decompress after a stressful day? Who are the people they speak to, who do they trust? And where do they go and what do they do when they’re not working? We sometimes revisit a time in their career when they felt mentally and physically healthy and happy, and they consider what they’ve gradually let slip. Starting a conversation on wellbeing can alert them that they stopped doing the things that made them feel well, whether it’s going for a run in the morning or doing a hobby. Two things really help. Firstly, a sense of letting go and giving themselves permission for rest and recovery. And secondly, having an accountability partner. I ask them to message me each time they’ve prioritised their health. When they message me, it makes me smile.

What practical steps can we all take around self-leadership?

I often hear people say they ‘suffer from imposter syndrome’. It’s really unhelpful language. It suggests that something is wrong and yet it’s perfectly normal for all of us to doubt ourselves. If you know yourself well, you know the skills you have and what you’re good at. Comparing yourself to another, seemingly successful person doesn’t yield any useful or accurate information and just makes you feel inadequate. You’ve reached a point in your career where you’ve collected a lot of expertise and experience. This is what I like to call “credit in the bank”. By starting there, you can look at what you want to develop further. You already have a strong baseline that’s not as low as you think. It’s just a case of adding to it.

With artificial intelligence (AI), how do you see leadership evolving in the coming years and the skills that will become more important?

AI is an interesting one because there’s no getting away from it. We have to lean into where it can help us. But leaders have to keep connecting with their teams on a human level. They can lean into their humanity more through a heightened understanding of self, emotional intelligence and empathy. They can understand context and create nuance better than AI currently. There’ll be a greater need for self-awareness and discernment about what’s going on in our teams and with clients. Knowing how to relate to people will be more important, and that’s beyond AI’s capability at the moment.

Finally, what’s the best leadership advice you’ve ever been given?

I’m going to turn to the words of two experts for this as they have great resonance with the work I do. Firstly, Dr Marcia Reynolds, who’s a US-based executive coach to large multi-national companies and government who said: “When you tell people what to do, it pacifies their brain. When you coach people, it activates their brain”. And secondly, Garry Ridge, the former CEO of the manufacturing company, WD-40 said, “The smartest leaders don’t have all the answers; they ask the best questions.” Both quotes speak to empowering others to do more, to do better, and to lead themselves.

Thanks, Yolanda, and what a great way to end! You can connect with Yolanda on LinkedIn or via her website.