Leadership Lessons From Coaching Hockey
Long before I was leading creative teams, building UX practices, managing brands, or sitting in meetings discussing marketing strategy, I was standing behind a hockey bench trying to figure out how to coach.
I started coaching shortly after college. I certainly didn't have decades of leadership experience to draw from, and I didn't have all the answers. What I did have was a love for hockey, a desire to help players improve, and an early realization that knowing how to play the game and knowing how to coach people to play it were two very different things.
Years later, hockey brought me back to coaching in a much more personal way when my son began playing. This time, I approached coaching differently. I had more professional leadership experience, but I also understood how much I still had to learn. Through USA Hockey's coaching education and certification programs, clinics, other coaches, and countless hours at practices and games, I became much more of a student of coaching.
Somewhere along the way, I began noticing how often lessons from the rink followed me into work.
Leading creative teams at Action Performance, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, and Alliant Credit Union may seem very different from coaching a hockey team. The environments certainly are different, but the leadership challenges often aren't.
You're working with people who have different abilities, personalities, motivations, and levels of experience. You're trying to create something that's better than the sum of the individual parts. You have to prepare people without over-coaching them, make adjustments when things aren't working, build confidence after mistakes, hold people accountable, and understand when leadership requires direction versus when it requires getting out of the way.
Most importantly, you eventually learn that having talented individuals doesn't automatically give you a great team.
That's true on the ice, and I've found it equally true in creative leadership.
Knowing the Game Doesn't Automatically Make You a Good Coach
When I first started coaching after college, I knew hockey. At least, I thought I did.
Like many young coaches, I probably assumed that understanding the game meant I could teach it. But playing and coaching require very different skills. A player can rely on instinct developed through repetition. A coach has to explain that instinct to someone who may see the game completely differently.
That was one of my earliest leadership lessons: expertise and leadership aren't the same thing.
I've seen the same transition happen in creative careers. Great designers become Art Directors. Great writers become Creative Directors. Strong individual contributors become managers. Suddenly, the thing that made them successful—being exceptionally good at doing the work—is no longer enough.
Your job changes from doing to developing.
As a Creative Director, it doesn't matter if I can solve every design problem myself. If I'm always the person providing the answer, I'm limiting the development of everyone around me. Leadership requires helping other people understand the problem, develop their judgment, and eventually make strong decisions without needing me.
Coaching taught me that before I had the vocabulary to describe it.
Every Player Doesn't Need to Play the Same Way
One of the things USA Hockey coaching education reinforced for me was the importance of player development. You're not simply teaching systems or trying to win the next game. You're developing individual players over time.
That requires understanding that people develop differently.
Some players immediately understand a concept when it's drawn on a whiteboard. Others need to see it demonstrated. Some need repetitions. Some need encouragement. Others respond to being challenged. A coach who insists on communicating the same way to every player is probably going to reach only part of the team.
Creative teams work the same way.
I've led designers, developers, writers, UX professionals, email specialists, social specialists, and other creative and marketing professionals throughout my career. They haven't all needed the same thing from me.
Some people thrive with significant autonomy. Others want regular feedback. Some think out loud and want collaboration throughout the process. Others need time alone before they're ready to share an idea. Some want stretch assignments immediately, while others need confidence before they're ready for the next challenge.
Leadership isn't lowering or changing expectations for every person. The standard can remain high while the way you help someone reach that standard changes.
A hockey coach doesn't try to turn every player into the same player.
A creative leader shouldn't try to turn every creative into the same creative.
Your Job Is to Put People in Positions to Succeed
Not every hockey player is going to be the leading scorer.
A successful team needs different strengths. You need people willing to battle along the boards, make the smart pass, play defense, communicate, create space, and do things that may never appear on the scoresheet.
The challenge for the coach is recognizing those strengths and putting players in situations where they can contribute.
I've tried to bring the same philosophy into my professional leadership.
At Action Performance Companies, I was working in an environment where creativity, digital technology, e-commerce, licensing, and the world of NASCAR all intersected. We were supporting multiple brands, more than 1,000 dealers, digital commerce, and licensed products in a fast-moving sports and entertainment business.
That environment taught me the value of different kinds of creative talent. The person who could develop an exciting visual idea wasn't necessarily the same person who understood how to turn it into a digital experience or translate it across a larger system.
The answer wasn't deciding which skill was more valuable.
The answer was figuring out how those skills could work together.
That became increasingly important as I moved into larger leadership roles. The strongest teams I've led haven't been groups of people who think exactly alike. They've been groups where different strengths complement one another.
Great leaders don't simply identify talent. They create situations where talent can succeed.
Practice Is Where Development Happens
Hockey games get the attention, but most development happens during practice.
That's where players try something new, make mistakes, receive feedback, repeat skills, and gradually turn conscious decisions into instinct.
Creative organizations sometimes forget the equivalent of practice.
Everything becomes a deliverable. Every project has a deadline. Every hour needs to produce something. Teams become so focused on output that they leave very little room for experimentation, learning, critique, or skill development.
Eventually, that catches up with you.
At Best Western Hotels & Resorts, where I helped establish the organization's first dedicated UX practice, we had to develop new capabilities while simultaneously doing the work. That meant introducing UX principles, usability practices, accessibility, design systems, testing, and new ways of collaborating across e-commerce, technology, and marketing.
Experimentation became part of how we learned.
A/B and multivariate testing gave us a particularly valuable version of practice because it allowed us to challenge assumptions with actual customer behavior. We could develop an idea, test it, learn from the results, and apply that knowledge to the next decision. Over time, that approach contributed to more than $14 million in incremental digital revenue.
The lesson wasn't simply that testing works.
It was that great teams need environments where learning is part of the work rather than something that happens outside it.
You Can't Coach Every Shift From the Bench
Anyone who has coached youth hockey knows how tempting it can be to shout instructions throughout a game.
Move the puck. Get back. Cover the point. Skate. Pass. Shoot.
You can quickly become a running commentary track.
But players have to learn to read the game themselves. Hockey moves too quickly for someone on the bench to make every decision for them. The coach prepares them, provides a structure, gives feedback, and makes adjustments, but once they're on the ice, they have to play.
Creative leadership is no different.
If every decision needs to come through the Creative Director, you've created a team that can only operate at the speed of one person.
I've had to learn this myself. Creative leaders often get promoted because they have strong opinions and good instincts. Those qualities are valuable, but they can also create a tendency to over-direct.
At Alliant, I led a multidisciplinary creative and brand team that included designers, developers, writers, email and social specialists. I couldn't—and shouldn't—be the expert making every decision across every discipline.
My responsibility was to create clarity around what we were trying to accomplish, establish expectations, remove barriers, ask good questions, and trust people to apply their expertise.
Sometimes the best leadership decision is not making the decision yourself.
Systems Matter, but Players Still Have to Think
Hockey teams need systems. Players need to understand where they're supposed to be, how teammates will respond, and what responsibilities they have in different situations.
But a system that requires players to stop thinking isn't very useful.
The game is unpredictable.
So is business.
This is one reason Agile principles made sense to me when I began applying them to creative organizations. I wasn't interested in turning a creative department into a software development team or introducing process simply for the sake of process. What interested me was visibility, prioritization, communication, and the ability to adjust.
At Alliant, those principles helped us rethink how work moved through the creative organization. Better visibility into priorities and workloads allowed people to understand what mattered, while still giving them the flexibility to determine how best to solve the problem.
That's similar to a good hockey system.
The structure gives people confidence.
It shouldn't take away their instincts.
The Scoreboard Matters, but It Doesn't Tell the Whole Story
Hockey gives you an incredibly simple performance dashboard.
Look at the scoreboard.
Business is more complicated, but we still love scoreboards: revenue, conversions, engagement, acquisition, retention, NPS, project throughput, and dozens of other metrics.
I believe in measurement. At Best Western, data and experimentation helped us generate significant digital revenue improvements. At Alliant, the work my teams supported contributed to membership growth, customer experience, stronger brand governance, and improved operational efficiency.
But coaching has reminded me that the scoreboard never tells the entire story.
A youth hockey team can lose a game while playing significantly better than it did the week before. A player can have no goals or assists and still play an outstanding game. Another player can score twice while repeatedly making poor decisions that hurt the team.
Creative organizations face the same challenge.
A campaign can miss a target while teaching you something incredibly valuable. A designer can produce strong work that never launches because business priorities change. A team can dramatically improve its process without that improvement immediately appearing in revenue.
Good leaders pay attention to outcomes.
Great leaders also pay attention to progress.
Mistakes Need to Be Safe Enough to Learn From
Hockey players make mistakes constantly.
A defenseman pinches at the wrong time. A forward misses an assignment. Someone makes a bad pass through the middle. A goalie lets in a shot they would normally stop.
The coach has a choice.
You can make the player afraid of making another mistake, or you can help them understand what happened and prepare them for the next opportunity.
Creative teams need the same psychological safety.
That doesn't mean lowering standards or avoiding difficult feedback. It means separating a poor decision from the person who made it.
I've always believed feedback should help someone move forward. Telling a designer, "This isn't working yet," opens a conversation. Helping them understand why gives them an opportunity to solve the problem. Simply telling them exactly what to change may fix the immediate deliverable, but it doesn't necessarily develop the person.
The goal isn't to eliminate mistakes.
The goal is to make sure we learn from them.
Sometimes the Player Needs Encouragement. Sometimes They Need a Push.
Coaching has also taught me that leadership can't operate on autopilot.
There are moments when someone needs confidence.
There are other moments when they need accountability.
A player struggling after a mistake doesn't necessarily need a coach pointing out what everyone in the rink already saw. They may need to hear, "You've got the next one."
Another player may need to be challenged because they're capable of more effort or focus than they're giving.
The difficult part is knowing the difference.
Creative leadership requires the same judgment. There are moments when someone needs space to figure something out, moments when they need direct feedback, moments when they need you to advocate for them, and moments when they need you to tell them that their work isn't meeting the standard.
Leadership isn't about being endlessly supportive or endlessly demanding.
It's knowing what this person needs from you in this moment to move forward.
The Team Has to Be Bigger Than Any One Player
Hockey makes individual contribution very visible, but individual talent alone rarely creates sustained success.
Teams need trust.
They need people willing to make the extra pass, cover for a teammate, communicate, accept roles, and put the team's outcome ahead of their personal statistics.
I've seen the same thing across creative organizations.
The most talented designer in the department can still damage the team if they can't collaborate. A brilliant Creative Director who needs to own every idea eventually suppresses the people around them. A high-performing team isn't simply a collection of high-performing individuals.
At Action Performance, Best Western, and Alliant, the scale and complexity of the work increasingly required collaboration across disciplines. Designers needed developers. UX needed technology. Creative needed marketing. Marketing needed analytics. Internal teams needed agencies and outside partners.
No single person could create the outcome alone.
That requires leaders to reward collaboration rather than just individual visibility.
Good Coaches Keep Learning
Returning to coaching later in life taught me something else.
Experience doesn't mean you've finished learning.
By the time I began coaching my son's teams, I had years of professional leadership experience behind me. It would have been easy to assume I already understood how to lead people.
Instead, USA Hockey encouraged me to become a student again.
Through coaching education, certification, clinics, other coaches, and simply watching what worked and what didn't, I kept refining how I thought about teaching and developing players.
I think senior leaders need the same humility.
The fact that something worked for me ten years ago doesn't mean it's the right approach today. Creative teams have changed. Technology has changed. Employee expectations have changed. AI is changing workflows again.
Experience should give us perspective.
It shouldn't give us permission to stop learning.
That's particularly important for Creative Directors because our teams are often filled with people who know things we don't. I want designers who understand emerging tools better than I do. I want developers who challenge my technical assumptions. I want younger creatives who understand audiences and platforms differently than I do.
My job isn't to know more than everyone.
My job is to make all of that knowledge useful to the team.
What Hockey Has Taught Me About Creative Leadership
After coaching at different stages of my life and leading teams across very different organizations, a few lessons continue to connect the rink and the workplace:
Develop people, not just performance. Today's project or game matters, but the bigger responsibility is helping people become better over time.
Coach the individual while leading the team. Different people need different things from you, even when everyone is working toward the same standard.
Create structure without eliminating instinct. Systems should help people make better decisions, not require leaders to make every decision for them.
Measure progress as well as outcomes. The scoreboard matters, but it doesn't tell you everything about how a team is developing.
Make mistakes useful. High standards and psychological safety can coexist when feedback is focused on learning and improvement.
Put people in positions where their strengths matter. Not everyone needs to contribute in the same way to make the team successful.
Keep learning. Leadership experience should increase curiosity, not eliminate it.
None of these ideas belongs exclusively to hockey or creative leadership. They're fundamentally about helping groups of people accomplish something together that none of them could accomplish as effectively alone.
Final Thoughts
When I first stepped behind a bench after college, I wasn't thinking about how hockey would shape my philosophy as a creative leader. I just wanted to coach the game I loved and hopefully help some players get better.
Coming back to coaching years later with my son gave the experience an entirely different meaning. I was older, had spent years managing and developing people professionally, and yet I found myself becoming a student again. USA Hockey's coaching education reminded me that leadership is a craft of its own and that good coaches never really finish learning it.
Looking back, I can see pieces of those lessons throughout my career.
At Action Performance, I learned how different creative and technical strengths could come together around a shared objective.
At Best Western, I learned the importance of building capabilities, creating room for experimentation, and using results to help a team learn.
At Alliant, I learned even more about creating clarity, trusting multidisciplinary experts, removing organizational friction, and building systems that allow people to perform without requiring the leader to make every decision.
And hockey continues to remind me that leadership isn't about standing behind the bench shouting instructions.
It's about preparing people for the moment when you can't tell them what to do.
You teach.
You challenge.
You encourage.
You create a system.
You make adjustments.
You hold people accountable.
And then you trust them enough to play.
I've come to believe creative leadership works much the same way.
The measure of a great coach isn't how much the team needs the coach. It's how well the team performs, adapts, and grows because of the coaching they've received.
That's a leadership lesson I've carried from the rink to the creative department—and one I expect I'll continue learning for a long time.
Join the Conversation
If you've coached a sport, led a team, or had a coach who made a lasting impact on you, what lesson from sports has influenced the way you lead at work?
I'd especially love to hear from other coaches and creative leaders. What have you learned behind the bench, on the field, or in the locker room that changed how you lead people professionally?
Share your experience. I suspect some of our most useful leadership lessons were learned long before anyone gave us a leadership title.