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Thanks to Julijana Gugucevski and the LinkedIn team for inviting me to speak at an internal leadership workshop at LinkedIn’s Sydney headquarters.
Trust. Sacrifice. Vision.
Three principles that consistently drive elite performance - in professional sport and in high-performing corporate teams.
I’m Jakub Novak, a high-performance cycling coach and former professional athlete, and I was invited to join LinkedIn’s APAC leadership group for a private offsite workshop and fireside chat focused on building and scaling high-performing teams.
This session connected real-world performance systems from professional cycling with leadership, talent development and team effectiveness in a global technology organisation.
Why LinkedIn invited a performance coach from professional sport
Elite cycling teams operate in one of the most performance-driven environments in the world:
- extreme time pressure
- constantly changing conditions
- clear accountability
- and zero tolerance for misalignment
These constraints make professional cycling a powerful case study for modern leadership, organisational performance and team design.
During the session, we explored how elite teams:
- design role clarity at individual and team level
- align personal objectives with collective outcomes
- manage pressure, fatigue and motivation over long performance cycles
- and build decision-making frameworks for high-stakes moments
Fireside chat: translating elite sport into corporate team performance
The fireside chat focused on practical leadership and performance themes that directly apply to corporate teams, especially fast-moving, target-driven environments.
1. Clear roles create trust and execution speed
In professional cycling, every athlete and staff member has a precisely defined role.
High-performing teams do not rely on goodwill or informal understanding.
They rely on clarity.
In corporate teams, role ambiguity often creates:
- duplicated effort
- missed ownership
- and hidden performance risk
Performance improves rapidly when teams make responsibilities visible and measurable.
2. Individual performance must strengthen the team system
A key leadership challenge discussed during the session was the balance between:
- individual targets
- and collective business objectives
In elite cycling, this tension is solved by design.
Individual performance goals exist — but they are always subordinate to the team outcome.
The strongest teams deliberately engineer:
- how individual success feeds the wider system
- how performance reviews reflect team contribution
- and how incentives reinforce collaboration, not competition
3. Sacrifice is not culture – it is trained behaviour
In professional sport, sacrifice is not a value statement.
It is a trained performance skill.
Athletes repeatedly practise:
- giving up personal opportunities
- changing strategy under pressure
- and supporting a teammate at decisive moments
The same principle applies to leadership teams operating under commercial pressure.
If teams do not rehearse trade-offs before critical moments arrive, execution fails when it matters most.
4. Vision is the anchor during uncertainty
In elite sport, motivation fluctuates.
What remains stable is direction.
We discussed how high-performing teams use:
- a clearly defined long-term objective
- aligned short-term milestones
- and shared performance language
to stay aligned even when conditions, priorities and strategies change.
Without a shared performance vision, leadership conversations quickly become operational instead of strategic.
How executives can apply elite cycling principles to high-performing corporate teams
For executives and senior leaders, the most valuable lesson from elite cycling is that performance is not managed through motivation alone — it is engineered through structure. In professional cycling teams, leaders define clear performance roles, decision ownership and contribution expectations before competition begins. The same approach can be applied in executive and leadership teams by explicitly mapping responsibilities to outcomes, clarifying who leads under pressure, and designing decision pathways before critical moments occur.
High-performing executive teams that adopt elite sport principles focus on three practical shifts: aligning individual KPIs to shared strategic outcomes, creating visible role ownership across cross-functional initiatives, and reviewing performance through team contribution rather than isolated results. Just as cycling teams rehearse race scenarios in advance, executive teams that simulate strategic decisions, escalation paths and collaboration under pressure consistently improve execution speed, trust and accountability.
This performance-systems approach enables leaders to move beyond culture statements and instead build repeatable structures for high performance, resilience and execution — the same systems used in elite sport environments to deliver results under extreme pressure.
About Jakub Novak – performance coach and former professional cyclist
I work with athletes and teams on:
- performance system design
- workload and fatigue management
- role clarity and accountability frameworks
- motivation and goal-setting structures
- and long-term performance development
My background combines elite professional cycling and real-world coaching across competitive and performance-driven environments.
The same principles used to build winning teams in sport translate directly into:
- leadership development
- high-performance team culture
- and sustainable execution in business.
Acknowledgements
Thank you again to the LinkedIn leadership team and organisers, especially Julijana Gugucevski, Sarah French and Adam Gregory, for inviting me to contribute to the APAC leadership offsite and for the open, high-quality discussion around team performance, leadership and organisational alignment.
