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SPORTS AND WELLBEING

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There are never enough individuals or organizations committed to fostering leadership in sports. It is very exciting to have an initiative dedicated to leadership and wellbeing focused on creating a Global Culture of Wellbeing in sports and witnessing its growth. Recent achievement in the leadership in sports area was engaging in research and co-authoring an article on the role of General Counsel in the prevention of harassment and abuse in international sports. The former General Counsel of GE (worked for Jack Welch) and the Lecturer at Harvard Law School, Ben Heineman (author of Inside Counsel Revolution”) commented on the impact of this article as follows:
"The Tone From the Top: The Role of the General Counsel in the Prevention of Harassment and Abuse in International Sports" is an outstanding article that provides solid grounding for lawyers and their organizations in the prevention of abuse and harassment in the vital and risky area of sports, as many recent scandals have show."
  • This article was published by Frontiers as part of a special publication by the World Athletics in Monaco dedicated to the Prevention of Abuse and Harassment in Athletics and Sports. The article can be found here. In the interview related to this important safeguarding topic Andrea Carska-Sheppard emphasized the need for leadership and zero tolerance, and identified its target audience as follows:
  • “The article speaks to the most senior lawyers working in international sports, but there are also aspects that speak to lawyers in general. The safeguarding and prevention of harassment and abuse should not only be on the radar of human resource departments and employment counsels (either in-house or outside legal advisors), but because it is a much broader societal matter, for companies it is part of their ESG.”
  • Not only in relation to safe-sports but in general, strong Ecological, Societal and Governance (ESG) mandate is the reflection of top leaders and its “tone from the top.” Professor Sonnefeld in his article “ What makes great boards great” noted:
  • “It’s difficult to tease out the factors that make one group of people an effective team and another, equally talented group of people a dysfunctional one; well-functioning, successful teams usually have chemistry that can’t be quantified. They seem to get into a virtuous cycle in which one good quality builds on another. Team members develop mutual respect; because they respect one another, they develop trust; because they trust one another, they share difficult information; because they all have the same, reasonably complete information, they can challenge one another’s conclusions coherently; because a spirited give-and-take becomes the norm, they learn to adjust their own interpretations in response to intelligent questions.”

JEFFERY SONNENFELD "WHAT MAKES GREAT BOARDS GREAT", HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, SEPTEMBER 2002.