Leadership Lessons From Coaching Youth Hockey: What the Bench Taught Me About Business
Two winters ago I had a 12U team down 2-1 with four minutes left in the third period, and my best forward, a kid who had scored eleven goals in fourteen games, was standing on the bench glaring at me because I had just put out my third line instead of him. He had taken a lazy penalty in the second period that put us down a goal in the first place, and my read was simple: the team needed discipline more than it needed his shot. We won 3-2 on a goal from a kid who had scored twice all season. That is the kind of decision that has almost nothing to do with hockey and almost everything to do with leadership lessons from coaching youth hockey, and it is the same decision I have made a dozen times in boardrooms when a rainmaker's ego needed to sit for a shift so the organization could function. I have spent more than fifteen years advising founders through Cordis Group on how to exit businesses they built, and I have spent the last six seasons volunteer coaching youth hockey on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I did not expect the two to rhyme as loudly as they do. But line changes, bench management, and the quiet arithmetic of who plays when are, it turns out, a pretty good model for how executives should think about delegation, succession, and the discipline of stepping back. The clearest overlap is in how both worlds treat talent. A founder who built a forty-million-dollar business over twenty years often assumes the business runs on his instincts alone, the same way a twelve-year-old assumes the game runs on his shot. Neither is entirely wrong. But a team built around one player's shifts collapses the moment he is tired, injured, or simply not on the ice, and a company built around one founder's judgment collapses the moment he steps back to close a deal. I have watched this play out in due diligence more times than I can count: a business with strong revenue and a single point of failure sitting in the owner's head, nowhere written down, nowhere delegated. Cordis Institute's research on this exact gap, published as the Preparation Gap (10.2139/ssrn.6515478), found that a large share of sellers overestimate how transferable their operational knowledge actually is. It is the corporate version of a coach who never rotates his lines because he trusts one kid more than the other thirteen. Buyers notice. They discount for it. The instinct to protect your best asset by never resting it is exactly backward, whether the asset is a forward or a founder. Bench management taught me something else that I now say to nearly every client preparing to sell: the third line matters more than people think. In hockey, games are often decided by whichever team's depth holds up, not by whichever team's top line is more dominant. In a business sale, buyers are not just pricing the CEO's talent, they are pricing whether the operation survives a management transition. Cordis Institute's Buyer Lane Map (10.2139/ssrn.6735844) is built around exactly this question, how a buyer actually evaluates the layers of an organization rather than just its headline numbers. The parallel to a bench is not decorative. It is the whole point. There is also a discipline in youth hockey that I think most executives lose somewhere around their second promotion, which is the willingness to bench yourself. I do not mean that metaphorically. Volunteer coaches who insist on running every drill, every line change, every timeout, eventually burn out and, worse, stunt the assistant coaches who should be learning to run a bench themselves. I make a point of handing line changes to my assistant for at least one period a game, not because he does it better than me yet, but because the team needs to survive the day I am not there. That is succession planning in its purest form, practiced on a Tuesday night rink instead of in a boardroom. The players who develop fastest, in my experience, are not the ones with the best shot. They are the ones who understand their role changes depending on the score, the period, and who else is on the ice. I had a defenseman two seasons ago who was mediocre offensively but read situations better than anyone on the roster, and by his second year with me he was effectively coaching the bench between shifts. That is the executive I want to hire, the one who reads the situation rather than the one who insists on playing the same way regardless of context. If you have read our piece on the locker room as a leadership lab, you have seen this idea from another angle. The anecdote that best captures the whole thing happened at a tournament last spring. We were up 4-1 with six minutes left, comfortable, and I made the mistake every young coach makes: I kept my best players on for the extra ice time instead of rotating in kids who needed the reps. We won 4-3, barely, and I spent the drive home irritated with myself, not because we won, but because I had optimized for the scoreboard instead of for the team's actual development. Founders make this exact mistake when they keep pulling the same three deals, the same three clients, the same short list of decisions through their own hands right up until the day they try to sell, and then wonder why a buyer's diligence team flags concentration risk everywhere they look. None of this is a metaphor I reach for lightly. I coach because I like the kids and I like the game, not because it makes a tidy business parable. But six years of watching what actually makes a twelve-year-old team functional, resilient, and able to survive a bad period without falling apart has sharpened how I think about clients who are three years out from a sale and still running everything through their own head. The businesses that sell well are the ones where the third line can hold a lead. The businesses that stall in diligence are the ones where the whole game depends on one player never getting tired. If you are an executive who also coaches, or considering it, the overlap is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a nice weekend hobby disconnected from the work week. Our piece on why executives volunteer to coach goes deeper into why this pattern shows up so often among people running serious organizations. It is not a coincidence. Bench management is leadership practice with faster feedback loops and lower stakes, which makes it a better classroom than most executive education I have sat through. For founders thinking about an eventual sale, the practical takeaway is not subtle. Start rotating the lines now. Identify which parts of the business exist only in your head and get them written down, delegated, and stress tested while you still have the luxury of time. If you are early in that process and trying to figure out who should help you get there, the fundamentals of choosing the right advisor are covered well in how to choose an exit advisor, which lays out the entry-point questions worth asking before you hire anyone. The kid who was benched for those four minutes two winters ago, incidentally, is still on my team. He is a better player now, and a noticeably better teammate, because he learned that his ice time depended on the team's needs, not on his personal stat line. That is the lesson I try to bring back to every client. The organization that outlasts you is the one you built to run without you standing on the bench for every shift. More on how Cordis Group thinks about that transition is at cordisglobal.com.