Four-Time Olympian And CEO Angela Ruggiero Says: Everyone Is Terrified, Be Confident In Your Preparation

When business entrepreneur Angela Ruggiero was 9 years old, she was cut from a boy's hockey team, despite believing she was as good as the rest of the squad. She may have been cut, but she was determined to prove she had not been defeated.

Years later, the four-time Olympic medalist became the first female to play a non-goalie position on a men’s professional hockey team. Ruggiero played fearlessly on the ice, but she was anything but fearless, as she said in a recent episode of Corporate Competitor Podcast.

"Everyone's terrified underneath everything, even when you think somebody has really thick skin, everyone's terrified they're going to fail," she said. "That's just a human emotion. But if you are confident in your preparation, confident in following what you've always done in life to be ready, you will overcome your fear and succeed."

Ruggiero overcame whatever fears or disappointment she felt at being cut and turned her joy in playing hockey into the longest career of any man or woman in a USA Hockey jersey and, when she finally hung up her skates to attend Harvard Business School, laid claim to being only the fourth woman inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Back at Harvard, where she had earned her bachelor's degree and played hockey for the Crimson (winning the Patty Kazmaier Award, the Heisman trophy of hockey), Ruggiero studied the business of sports and became fascinated by the application of data analytics to business problems—and especially to the shifting demographics of sports entertainment in the digital age. This led her to co-found the Sports Innovation Lab.

"That experience, coupled with the time I had served on the International Olympic Committee Executive Board, looking at big deals, billions of dollars being spent, really studying the business of sports, made me recognize there wasn't the same data-driven approach to the business side of sports," Ruggiero said. The Sports Innovation Lab filled in this missing piece with data-driven market research that allowed the industry to unlock insights on their fans and how technology was changing fan behavior.

Ruggiero's data-driven approach earned her an appointment as Chief Strategy Officer for the Los Angeles 2028 Candidature Committee, which is vying to host the 2028 Olympics.

Ruggiero believes that in business, as in sport, disruptions can either make us afraid of venturing into uncharted territory or motivate us to use the new insights and possibilities they afford to edge our skillset ahead "inch by inch" in the pursuit of higher performance. Here are several ways Ruggiero helps her team (and herself) overcome fear to embrace challenging and novel situations.

• Don’t take shortcuts in prep work: Whether you call them shortcuts or hacks, we all find ways to use them in our work. How many times have we walked into a meeting having done a fraction of the pre-work and tried to bluff our way through it? Bad idea, says Ruggiero. "My Harvard coach Katey Stone used to say 'control the controllables'," said Ruggiero. "There will always be things you can't control—market forces or a pandemic—but the whole point of preparation is understanding the things you can individually control, so you are ready to show up at the meeting and do something better or differently." 
• Make preparation role-specific: Are you an individual contributor or team captain on a project? If the latter, prepare not only yourself but also your team to be successful. "When you don't take shortcuts in preparation… when you don't cheat yourself or your team, you feel you're going through life doing the best you can, so even if you don't succeed here or there, it's actually a pretty good feeling."
• Seek out inches and insights: As an athlete, Ruggiero says she was always looking for those insights, the little "nuggets of data" that would allow her to push her hockey career forward, prolong her career, and bring a better performance to her team so they could win another gold medal. "How do I get more inches out of my career? Out of my team?" she asked. In co-founding the Sports Innovation Lab, she wanted to create a research company that would allow the industry to better understand their business like she did her body and her team.

Ruggiero shared her belief that the best leaders and athletes in the world are the ones “who are constantly reinventing their swing,” so to speak, “or reevaluating their diet or leveraging technology” to unlock their potential and their team’s potential. That’s where real courage comes into play.