3 Business Lessons From The Ski Trails
Kate Johnson may have graduated from the Wharton School and currently serves as the president and CEO of Lumen Technologies, but she learned one of the most important lessons of her business career when her husband coached her to become a better skier.
Johnson, a lifelong athlete, always considered herself a “good” skier, but she “paled in comparison” to her husband, an expert on the slopes. The gap between their abilities limited the trails they could travel together. So, during one of their skiing trips to Deer Valley, Utah, Johnson realized that she could learn a lot from her husband on how to be a better skier and asked him to coach her.
His reaction was not what she expected. “Absolutely not,” he told her.
Johnson told her husband there were two reasons she wanted him to coach her—and one of them had nothing to do with skiing.
“This is really important to me,” she told him. “Number one, I want to be a better skier for us. We’ll be able to have more fun together if I’m not slowing you down on the trails or on different slopes. Number two, I want to be better at taking feedback in a way that is constructive. I want you to help me with this.”
Coming around to her idea, her husband said he would coach her, but there would be some ground rules if he were going to help her. “There have to be some rules,” he said. “I’m out if there’s any sort of emotional response that comes along with this.”
“Perfect,” she said. “That’s great. That’s your boundary. Well, I have a boundary as well. You can give me no more than three things to work on at any given time.”
Her request was a vital part of Johnson’s ask, a critical lesson she learned at the workplace over the years. Before leading Lumen, a company that has one of the world’s largest fiber networks that connects countless businesses and government agencies, Johnson headed Microsoft’s US division and served as an executive at Oracle and GE. Johnson’s specialty is leading businesses and digital transformation at Fortune 100 companies.
In a recent interview, Johnson said that one of the constants throughout her career (and lifetime on the slopes) has been to focus on improving no more than three things at a time. Call it her rule of three.
“I never do a development plan with somebody who has more than three priorities. I don’t think you can work on more than three,” Johnson said.
You can lose your focus if you’re taking on too many priorities, Johnson noted. “I think if you take seven priorities, and you sprinkle them around the company,” she said, “I hope that nobody’s working on more than three of those.”
In the interview, Johnson offered some tactical advice on how to excel in the workplace, including how to implement her “rule of three” into your leadership toolkit:
Thanks to following this advice and her husband’s coaching, Johnson is now a better skier. They hit the double black diamond runs, the most challenging slopes on a mountain, together.
“Long story short, I can ski anywhere on the mountain!” she said. “He really helped me break through not just skiing but also understanding that taking feedback needs to be easy for the person giving it to you. If you can create that safety in those boundaries of what are the rules for this, it can be extremely impactful.”
Other business leaders have also learned lessons from skiing. Dick Costolo, who was the CEO of Twitter from 2010 to 2015, has taken to the slopes. NBC has reported on how longtime Kyriba CEO Jean-Luc Robert sharpened his leadership skills by skiing. “I think it’s the fact that you’re outside of your regular world. It’s very refreshing. You have a lot of adrenaline going on and you have to make the right decision at the right time,” Robert told NBC News.