What can a footballer teach us about leadership? More than we expect. In a recent conversation with Tanvie Hans on L for Leadership, we found ourselves thinking less about the game itself and more about what it takes to perform when the stakes are high.
For us at The Arts Quotient, the live arts have been a rich source of inspiration to think about everything that makes flawless performance possible. Chatting with Tanvie, we realize that both sport and the arts are such interesting mirrors for leadership. They reveal that performance is not just an outcome, but an everyday practice that shapes the person long before an admiring audience witnesses the end result.
Four things from that conversation stayed with us.
1. Regulating Emotions
“You can have a bad moment, but the game keeps moving”
In his book, The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey draws a useful line between noticing a mistake and judging it. A shot goes wide. You can notice that, or you can turn it into “I always do this” and lose the next point to a story instead of a ball.
This happens in the performing arts too. There are no second chances or do overs. In a live show, there are many things that may not go exactly as planned. But you don’t stop to lose your temper or feel overcome. You continue with the show anyway.
And what separates noticing and judging is the regulation of emotion. It is not that you don’t feel for the lost opportunity or mistake, but you still have to stay with the team, pick yourself up and be ready for what comes next. As Tanvie says, “you can have a bad moment, but the game keeps moving”. Leadership asks for much the same. A setback can bring emotion, but the work rarely pauses with it.
2. Intuition in Decision Making
A goalkeeper facing a penalty reads the striker, the movement and the timing, and commits before she can consciously process every detail. Performers develop the same kind of intuition. A musician catches a shift in rhythm before naming it. An actor feels the room change and answers it before consciously clocking what happened.
Academics or formal leadership training, though, rarely teaches this. Research on leadership development finds that most of it favours analysis, planning and control, and has little time for intuition or improvisation (Skalican, 2018). But when the picture is incomplete and it usually is in our fast-changing world, intuition might be a significant game-changer for leaders.
3. Building Chemistry
“ The chemistry that I have with my team off the field will show on the field”.
In a dance ensemble, hours are spent learning each other’s timing, spacing, even breath, until the performers move coherently as a single unit. During a game of football, this means reading each other, anticipating the next move, and adjusting in real time.
According to Tanvie, “…the chemistry that I have with my team off the field will show on the field”. For her, a seamless performance comes from trust built quietly behind the scenes, and the coordination that shows up once you’re actually on the ground.
As a leader too, it might be worth investing in building chemistry at a granular level. While going out together for drinks or dinner might boost morale, this is much more about the nitty gritty of everyday work; how one person’s contribution fits into the next, and how the whole can become greater than the sum of its parts.
4. Resilience
If one quality stands out from Tanvie’s journey, it is resilience. She kept returning to football even when there were not many role models, no clear pathway, and an opportunity to represent India closed for reasons beyond her control. She kept going, eventually founding Sisters in Sweat as a space for women to find themselves through sport.
A dancer knows this kind of resilience too. A step that does not land, nine times running, still gets attempted a tenth time. Showing up again is the only way there is ever an eleventh. Seasoned leaders know this; returning after a hard conversation, a decision that did not work, staying the course even when the going gets tough. Sometimes, playing the long game is simply about showing up, repeatedly.
A Note from TAQ
Leadership is never just the moment people see, and never separate from the person living it. Behind every performance is a quieter kind of work that eventually shows up on the field, on the stage and in the way we lead. Tanvie’s story reminds us that what looks effortless is often built through emotion, instinct, relationships, and the willingness to keep returning. Perhaps that is where leadership begins: in everything we carry into the moment before anyone else sees it.