Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: US Olympics CEO Sarah Hirshland

I recently interviewed Sarah Hirshland, CEO of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the highest ranking woman in American sports. Sarah Hirshland is the CEO of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, where she leads the organization responsible for fielding US Olympic teams, protecting, supporting and empowering the Olympic and Paralympic athletes and overseeing the Olympic and Paralympic movements in the US. Sara, thank you for joining us.

Sarah: Thank you for having me, Adam, it's great to be with you. 

Adam: It's great to have you here. You grew up in Littleton, Colorado, about an hour away from Colorado Springs, home of the USOPC. You studied biology at Duke, but have been working in sports throughout your entire career. Started working in sports right out of college. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons most significantly shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Sarah: You recognize the common theme of sport. And the biology degree was intended to be a pathway into sports medicine. And so the thread of sport has been part of my life since I was a young, aspiring athlete, if you will, playing soccer competitively throughout high school and dabbling in lots of different sports that I was quite mediocre at. But sport was a place where boundaries came down, people united, we learned how to be part of a team, then we learned how to win and how to lose. And it was a very powerful influence on me as a young person and an environment that I decided quickly was one I wanted to spend a lot of time around in my life. And so I journeyed into finding a way to work in sport, initially thinking that would be medicine. Then diverting efforts and energy coming right out of college into working with some colleagues and friends of mine who were graduating or had graduated ahead of me and were starting a small sports technology startup company, and said, “Hey, we're gonna do this cool thing. Come along.” This was in the late 90s, when lots of companies were starting. Technology companies with big bold aspirations, and it sounded like a ton of fun, and I jumped on board.

Adam: Sarah, something that you shared right off the bat which stood out to me. You said that you were a mediocre high school athlete. I was a mediocre high school athlete. You want to State Championship playing soccer. You aren't a mediocre athlete. There's mediocre and there's mediocre. I could tell you what a mediocre athlete was. I was mediocre at best. I was the captain of probably the worst high school baseball team in the history of baseball. We were bad. You guys won a State Championship!

Sarah: Well, better to be a captain of a team than not a captain of a team, Adam. So congratulations to you for that. Whether good or bad, that's an honor. We did win the state championship. But it was probably my most proud moment in sport, you have to remember. I work among our country’s, and frankly, our world's best athletes. So I might have high standards. 

Adam: That's one of the most important characteristics among the very best leaders: humility, and you’re seeing it right there. What in your experience are the key characteristics of the best leaders?

Sarah: Fundamentally, you have to put kindness at the top of the list. Because, and I'm sure you and I could talk about this for hours, leading people is about making people feel valued, and being able to understand and recognize the contributions they're capable of making, and helping them achieve that potential. And in order to do that, you have to have a core sense of kindness. But you also have to have curiosity. And the best leaders in the world, I think, are also the best learners in the world. And that, in my mind, comes from the core place of just insatiable curiosity that never dries up and never goes away. For me, as I reflect, I don't know that I would say this is a critical trait for all leaders. But for me, decisiveness has been important in my career and the ability to make decisions and move on is something that I point to, and I'm proud of my ability to do that. And I think it has served me very well.

Adam: Kindness, curiosity, the best leaders are the best learners, decisiveness. Can you walk us through a critical decision that you had to make? How you got there, and your best advice on how to make the most challenging decisions?

Sarah: Well, perhaps the most important decision many leaders make, it falls to how you're allocating resources. I came into this organization five years ago, at an inherent time of enormous challenge, many would say crisis, and within a couple of years faced with leading through the pandemic. And in those moments, there were not a lot of clear right and wrong answers. But we needed to make progress. And we needed to move forward. And so the ability to take in the set of information you have at the moment, the best you can do, and making a decision, and having the conviction to say this is the best we can do right now, and I'm not 100% sure if it's right or if it's wrong, but it's the decision we're going to make and let's move. And then having conviction and confidence to say, ‘We're going to take the next step forward,’ and particularly coming into a crisis or the kind of uncertainty we were all facing, and COVID, I think helped us get through it.

Adam: And, Sarah, it's a little bit of an understatement to say that when you took over you were leading in crisis. It was an inflection point, the Larry Nasser scandal. And as a leader, there's nothing more important than protecting the people you're leading. Safety, front and center for every leader, at least it should be.

Sarah: Look, we talk about how important it is to be good listeners. And we all know that intuitively being good listeners is important. I'm not sure I've ever understood what real listening meant, until I was faced with that crisis. And you really learn how to – it's listening, and how to hear what people are telling you, and how to build the kind of trust that lets people truly open up and be honest and clear about their own experiences. And those experiences become more vibrant. When you're talking about personal safety, emotions, things that are very real and raw. And so you have to find a way to open your ears and open your heart to be able to accept that what you need to hear may be really difficult. Maybe it's something you don't intuitively want to believe. You don't want to experience. You don't want to feel the emotion that comes from knowing that other people might be experiencing terrible things. But you learn how to listen. And that opens doors to your ability to see a pathway to solutions and change.

Adam: Listening is essential to great leadership. You mentioned the importance of building trust. How can leaders build trust?

Sarah: You’ve got to do what you say. You have to live up to the commitments you make. You have to walk the walk of the values you profess. When there's congruence between who you say you are and the actions that you take, that creates a comfort with people that, whether they like the decisions you're making or not, they trust that the decisions you're making are consistent with the words you're using or the values you're professing. To me, a core piece of the puzzle is trying to create a really solid congruence between what you promise and what you say and what values you espouse, and the behaviors that you exhibit.

Adam: I think it's a really important point. It's not necessarily a matter of getting everyone around you to agree with you. Because at times, that's going to be impossible. But it's a matter of conducting yourself with integrity, with authenticity, with consistency, with honesty. That's how you build trust. 

Sarah: That's right. 

Adam: I want to go a little bit back into how you got to where you are. Right out of college, you took a job working for a startup in the world of sports. And today you're the highest ranking woman in the world of sports. What were the keys to rising within your career and what can anyone do to rise within their career?

Sarah: I worked in a lot of different areas of the industry. I learned early in my career. I spent a lot of time in the for-profit side of things working in and around different professional sports, collegiate sports. And understanding and learning about the primary economic driver of sports is often fan behavior and fan consumption, broadcast media rights, sponsorship rights are all driven by the engagement of the sports fan per se. And so understanding the fundamental economic drivers of an industry, and then spending time in those places. I would say my career has been one that is closer to a centimeter deep and a mile wide than a mile deep and a centimeter wide. And that's not a right or wrong approach. But it's an approach that I took and served me well with a lot of different experiences in and around a singular industry, but different parts of the industry. And then, after several years, and a couple of different organizations on the for-profit side of sport, a lot of the professional teams and leagues and entities like NASCAR and professional golf, the PGA Tour and things, I took a very significant detour, and went to work in the nonprofit sport administration space. And it is a vast distinction in the type of business. But the primary drivers of economics are similar. The motivation of a nonprofit organization is a bit distinct. You go from being profit-driven to purpose-driven. And that was something that felt right for me at that time in my life and continues to feel right for me today. And so, now I sit in an organization, the second I've worked in sport, in the nonprofit space where our purpose is the advancement of sport for sport's sake, as opposed to sport for business or profit’s sake. And it's a very different environment. We're more bureaucratic, governed more like, well, I use the word ‘governed’ that says enough, by boards of directors and lots of volunteer committees, lots of constituents that you're serving, and a much more complex ecosystem of entities that work together in advancement of a common purpose, but also a very different mindset about what are driving your decisions and factors when your primary outcomes aren't economics. And money becomes a means to an end and not not an ultimate goal, pros and cons of that.

Adam: Is your leadership style any different leading in a nonprofit compared to leading in a for-profit business? Or is your style the same, but the way that you have to apply your style is different given the different environments, given the different types of people, given the different goals?

Sarah: Yeah, it's a great question. I think there are some important differences. Today, my leadership is successful, or the degree of success is derived from the degree of influence I can have, not the degree of authority that I have. And so I do think bringing people along, bringing constituents along, and really doubling down on ensuring that there's a broad understanding of decisions as they're being made, is more important in an environment in which you have influence but not authority. That's probably subtle, because I think successful leaders, even when they have a lot of authority, are probably more successful when they use it more as influence than authority. But there are distinctions there, and it is something I'm pretty conscious of.

Adam: I think that's a really, really important point, drawing a distinction between authority and influence. And in my experience, spending time with hundreds of the most successful leaders, the very best leaders don't lean on authority. They understand that, to influence others, it doesn't come down to telling them ‘Do this, do that, because I have this title, and my title is higher than yours.’ It comes down to persuading. It comes down to convincing others to do something because ‘Here's why. This is why you want to do it.’

Sarah: People are more effective, and frankly just let's just call it what it is, people are happier when they feel like they're in control of their own decisions.

Adam: I cannot agree with you more. A decision that so many people make at some point in their career is, ‘What am I going to do? Where am I going to work?’ And an industry that so many people want to work in is sports. What advice do you have for anyone interested in trying to break into the world of sports? Or for those working in the world of sports, trying to excel and advance in the world of sports?

Sarah: Yeah, it's a great question. And to be successful in sport, you have to apply the same disciplines to sport that you apply to any industry. Think about, what are the economic drivers? What are the powerful influences? Then you can layer on what are the unique strengths of sport, right? It is an incredible unifier. It brings communities together around a common purpose. And there's real power in that. It's also a very powerful influencer in the development of individual human’s health at the center of that. But it's not just physical fitness, it's physical health and mental health and a huge driver of important sort of values around resilience and goal setting and accomplishment and things of that nature. So if you understand the unique value proposition of what sport is and what it brings, and you understand some key economic drivers, then you can have a very meaningful conversation about why you want to work in sport, what parts of the industry might be interesting to you, what's going to get you out of bed in the morning, that goes beyond ‘I'm a sports fan, because I love it.’ And so I say to people all the time, if you love sport, unpack what it is about it that you love, what are those attributes that you can really articulate that you love, and use those to steer you whether it's steering where you want to work, or who you want to work with, or steering how you think about what you can contribute so that the application of the interest in and love for sport takes on the discipline of taking seriously advancing this industry, the way you would advance any other industry.

Adam: What have you found differentiates those who are ultimately able to excel within the industry, able to ultimately maintain a highly successful career in the world of sports, from those who try it, say, ‘I love sports. This is something that I grew up deeply passionate about. I love playing. I love watching. But maybe it's not a career for me.’ What separates the two?

Sarah: It's a good question. And I think you sort of answered your own question in that. If you want sport to be a respite from real life, if you want it to be a thing that is fun in your life, as an escape from work, then leave sport as a recreational spot in your life. If it's something where it's okay with you, if you're working when a lot of your friends are playing, because you love the work you're doing and you feel strongly about the purpose of what you're working in, then I would say, pursue a career in sport. But you have to recognize that for many of us who work in sport, lots of people in the world are painting their faces and putting on their jerseys and gearing up for their tailgate, those are the minutes when we're dug in deep and working hard. And so you have to recognize that going in. Working in sport doesn't mean I don't have to work. Working in sport means that's where I'm going to choose to spend my time and I've accepted that I'm serving many of those who find this to be enjoyment and escape from their lives. And for me it isn't that.

Adam: Two of the groups who you're serving are Olympians, and Paralympians, your two biggest constituent groups. 

Sarah: Absolutely. 

Adam: What are the best lessons that you've learned from your time spent around Olympians and your time spent around Paralympians?

Sarah: There is no collective group – I'll lump them together and just say Team USA athletes who are the best at their craft many times of anyone in the world and certainly among the best in the world, in almost every case, are the most disciplined group of human beings you'll ever meet. They make very deliberate choices. They set incredibly bold goals. And they work with massive discipline to reach them and to get there and so it's inspiring and motivating when you spend time around people who have the ability to be that disciplined and that focused, in constantly getting up the next day to be a little better than they were yesterday. And at the same time finding joy in that, and they laugh, and they have fun, and they celebrate, and they play and they're silly and make stupid mistakes like the rest of us. But boy, it's an incredible and contagious behavior to watch a group of human beings who have the ability to, almost without fail, get up the next day and say, ‘Okay, I'm going to do things a little better than I did yesterday. And I'm just gonna keep going.’

Adam: The word that I heard you repeat a few times, and to me is the key buzzword, is discipline. How can any one of us develop that level of discipline, and apply it to whatever it is that we're focused on excelling in, in our lives and in our careers?

Sarah: What I've observed in particular, and probably this is what I've learned to benefit myself the most from Team USA athletes, as they often pick a thing. They don't pick 30 things at once. And for them, the example usually, you’ll laugh, but it's, ‘I've got to work on my elbow rotation.’ Could be a thrower, right. ‘And so in order to advance my throwing, I've got to work on my elbow rotation.’ And it's not like they wake up on Monday and say, ‘I've got to work on my elbow rotation.’ And then on Tuesday, they say, ‘I'm going to work on my steps.’ They say ‘I'm gonna work on my elbow rotation,’ and then they go to work on their elbow rotation for like a year. And they build habits that are consistent, but they pick a thing, and then they go deep, and they lock that in. And then they pick the next thing, and they go deep, and they lock that in. And so as I think about it, if I use myself, I would say often, we want to fix everything all at once. What discipline allows you to do in this regard is pick a thing, and fix a thing at a time, and then decide what the next thing is that you want to fix and fix that, or get better at that or start this. But too often, we tend to oversubscribe ourselves across all the things we want to do and pushing 52 balls down the field at one time is a lot. And we probably aren't going to be very successful in that regard.

Adam: I really love that. And so much of it comes down to focus. But to your point, not just focusing on one thing, but taking that one thing and breaking it down. And understanding, within that one thing, is there a subset of that one thing that I could be laser focused on, that I could master, that I could become completely expert in? And until I become completely expert in that one thing, I'm not going to move on. I'm going to master it. And then once I do, then I could move on to that next thing. And that's such an interesting way of approaching your craft, whatever your craft is. It could be being an Olympian. It could be being a baseball player. It could be doing anything.

Sarah: Yeah, I think that's right. And on top of discipline, the other thing it takes is a certain amount of patience. You described it beautifully, which is try to couple discipline and focus, and then give yourself the grace of time. It's the combination of those things, is probably what allows you to actually see long term sustainable impacts. And so you just have to take a long view of things and have the patience to let things sink in a little bit. And that's just a constant pattern of staying the course, staying focused, and giving it time.

Adam: Something that you mentioned, which I've also identified, having interviewed countless Olympic gold medalists. The most successful athletes, just like the most successful people across all disciplines, fail. But when they fail, failure isn't terminal. Failure is a bump in the road. And I want to explore this topic with you. You've enjoyed so much success over the course of your career. You've risen to incredible heights professionally. Can you share with listeners the most significant failure of your career? What you learned from it, and your best advice for anyone listening on how to manage and navigate the failures and obstacles and challenges that they face in their lives and in their careers?

Sarah: I try to see failure, think about failure as a gift. And you always think about if you're not failing at something, you're probably not learning a ton. Because those are the moments when you have the most astounding revelations and the most ability to learn and it's a pretty powerful thing. And so you want to see that as a bit of a gift and make sure that you do take the time to say, ‘Okay, what happened here?’ I'm thinking about the best example of failure that I can give in my career. There've been a few points in time where we really felt like throwing up our hands and frankly, running in a closet and crying. And one of them was when I was reasonably young, in my career. I was probably in my maybe late 20s, maybe 30. And I've been working for this sports technology startup. And my career trajectory in that organization was extraordinary. And there weren't many people at that point in time who knew a lot more than I did about sports technology, because it was new. And so there were plenty of incredibly savvy experienced businessmen and women out there, but there weren't that many people who had expertise in what then were this notion of websites and doing audio broadcasts over this thing called the Internet. And I know that makes me sound old, but it wasn't that long ago. And so I had a lot of credibility, despite the reality that I had very little work experience, and was young, and in many ways, still pretty ignorant. But we were building this incredible company, going through, literally more than $100 million of venture capital funding. I was young, and had a team of about 25 people that worked for me at that point. And so I felt like the queen of the world, like ‘Holy cow, this is one of those extraordinary stories that people write books about. We're killing it. We're growing at incredible paces. We're building this big business. I have all these people who are working for me, and I'm managing all of this work and have massive amounts of responsibility.’ And people were calling me to ask my opinion on a thing. And so that was a pretty profound moment. And within probably four months of me feeling like I was on the top of the mountain, the entire business collapsed. And we filed bankruptcy. And I went from thinking, I was going to be financially set for the rest of my life at a very young age, and had sort of crafted this career that was going to make me an expert, and wildly successful, incredible to handing out pink slips to 27 people who reported to me and then packing up my box, and walking out and leaving the office all in one day. And it was devastating. absolutely devastating. But I look back now, and fortunately I had an incredible mentor, who, at the time said, ‘You just learned your MBA on the job, most people pay for theirs, and you just got paid for yours.’ And it was kind of a profound statement. And it took me probably longer than it should have to really let that sink in and recognize what he was saying to me, and what I could learn from that experience. But boy, I am enormously grateful today for having been through that and gone through that and recognizing the fragility of companies and entities and circumstances in the business world and how fast they can change. But also the reality that companies are companies and work is work. And people are people and relationships and humanity should never be confused with business and companies and organizations. And it was a pretty profound moment in that regard.

Adam: I really love what your mentor shared, which is, at the end of the day, there's a silver lining in everything and find that silver lining. What can anyone listening to this conversation do to become a better leader?

Sarah: We have to keep things in perspective. And working in this organization now, I've never been in a place where we're more driven by passion and emotion. And so keeping our work in perspective is maybe harder here than it's ever been in my life. But when you work in sport, I say all the time, we're in the passion business. And that's a really awesome business to be in. But it can also make all kinds of things irrational. And so we have to work really hard to keep things in perspective. And I say that we get really wrapped up in, particularly those of us who are Type A, driven, ambitious people, we get really wrapped up in success and we want really badly for everything to be perfect and right and all at once. And sometimes when the stress of that or the anxiety of that reaches the top of the cup as they say and your cup is ready to spill over. You've got to step away from that and find outlets in which you can gain the perspective that it's just another day, and the sun is going to come up tomorrow. And that you can work really hard, and give something your very best and you should feel great about that, but it should never define your identity. And it should never define your self worth. You've got to find that from inside and from somewhere else. I think the one challenge that I think about every day, is how do we make all of the people in our ecosystem, those we serve, customers, constituents, staff and employees, team members, even my board of directors, how do we make them feel valued? And I don't say that in a way that says they aren't valued, and I want to make them feel like they are. No, I say it in a way that says, this isn't about an articulation of value that's on paper. This is about how they feel, and driving their emotions. And so when I say how do we make people feel valued, I really genuinely want them to emotionally feel what it feels like to know that you're valued. And because that at the end of the day, in my mind, is what drives individual happiness and contentment, and therefore productivity and a desire to go above and beyond. And so I would say that's my advice for all of us is, how do we think about the people in our ecosystem, and genuinely do what we have to do to make sure that they understand and feel emotionally feel their value to the effort to the organization to the cause, to the initiative to the project, to the team, whatever it may be. And the same, by the way, is true in our athlete community. They want to achieve but where we garner the greatest reward is in feeling valued.

Adam: Sarah, you used the word feel many times. And when I hear you say ‘feel’, what I think of is care. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Adam: That's really what it comes down to. Leaders have to care. Not that much more complicated than that. If you care for people, it's 99% of it. 

Sarah: That's right. That's right. 

Adam: Sarah, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Sarah: I'm going to use your proportions. Spend 99% of your time focusing on others' success, and how to make others successful, and spend 1% of your time focusing on your own.

Adam: Are we plagiarizing from Yogi Berra here? 

Sarah: Maybe. Is that acceptable?

Adam: Yogi Berra is a legend. So if either one of us can come anywhere close to Yogi Berra, we're in good company. 

Sarah: Right. 

Adam: Sarah, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of the Thirty Minute Mentors.

Sarah: My pleasure. It's been great to talk with you.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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