What Elite Sport Can Teach Scale-Ups

I recently sat down with Dr. Blake McLean, UTS Sports, Exercise and Rehabilitation Associate Professor and Head of Performance R&D with the Oklahoma City Thunder, 2025 NBA champions.

Blake, Chris Mieir (UTS Business school) and I discussed his research, which focuses on both player and non-player performance, and how it applies to scaling and leaders. Blake is also a keynote speaker at the CEO Summit 2026.

From left: Claire Mula, Chris Meier and Dr Blake McLean at the University of Technology Sydney.

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There are a lot of parallels between sports and company building – it’s almost cliché. Passion, winning, competition, strategy, talent, coaches, team building, playbooks, training, grit, mindset, scoreboards. You’ve heard it.

Yet for the truly GREAT teams, consistently at the very top of the table, where does their next competitive edge come from?

Elite teams have the very best talent in the right positions. What’s more, their "game-winning" strategies are difficult to keep hidden for long — plays and results are transparent in every game.

So, how do you consistently out-compete the very best?

This was the question Dr. Blake McLean, Associate Professor at the UTS Sports, Exercise and Rehabilitation School, set out to answer almost a decade ago while working with Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team.

For decades, elite sports teams, such as professional or Olympic-level athletes, have heavily invested in player performance — scientifically monitoring, measuring and improving athlete performance through research and development.

The Team Behind the Team — Stress, Strain, and Coping

While player wellbeing and stress management aren’t new concepts, they’re not often applied to non-players in sport. The benefits of balancing intense training and high-pressure performance with rest and recovery are well documented. It leads to better, more sustained performance over time.

What about the team behind the team — the people accountable for improving player performance? In Work Demands, Responses, and Coping Strategies for Staff in High-Performance Sport (Mercer, Russell, Strack, Coutts & McLean, 2025), Blake McLean and colleagues mapped over 120 studies on coaches, performance and medical staff — the “team behind the team.”

Coaches and support staff in elite sports report heavy workloads, erratic hours, high accountability, and constant scrutiny. These demands are intensified by organisational instability and pressure to keep winning. McLean’s research references models showing that burnout occurs when workload and pressure exceed available coping resources — whether that’s personal resilience, social support from colleagues, friends or family, or organisational systems.

In short: even elite teams start to see cracks when the “support system” is overstretched and under-resourced. Stress and fatigue can lead to exhaustion and burnout, especially when mixed with a lack of support.

In short: even elite teams start to see cracks when the “support system” is overstretched and under-resourced.

On-Court Performance — The Cost of Load and Travel

We all understand the pressure of intense periods at work, but what if you travel frequently for your job?

In Factors Affecting NBA Game Performance Over the Course of a Season (Russell, McLean, Stolp, Strack & Coutts, 2025), McLean examined how physical load, travel, and rest affect players’ offensive and defensive performance across an NBA season.

Using detailed internal team data — from training metrics to travel distances and time zone changes — the study revealed that defensive performance dropped significantly after high travel demands (especially elevation changes and limited acclimation time) and under cumulative five-day workload peaks.

Interestingly, mood (a key athlete-reported measure) was most affected by time zone disruption, while other wellness indicators such as sleep and soreness showed less consistent change.

The takeaway: micro-fatigue accumulates silently, showing up not in obvious exhaustion but in subtle shifts that affect athletes’ ability to make better decisions, react quickly, and be good team players.

Micro-fatigue accumulates silently, showing up not in obvious exhaustion but in subtle shifts that affect athletes’ ability to make better decisions, react quickly, and be good team players.

Parallels with Scale-Up Leadership Research

I find many parallels between Blake's human performance research in elite sport and the pressures experienced by founders, leaders, and teams in scaling stage organisations.

Scaling puts pressure on an organisation because it often involves simultaneously managing high-growth, increasing complexity, while being system and resource-constrained (e.g. people or cash flow). Frequent organisational changes, new hires, and restructures amplify that strain.

Just as elite sports staff and players operate under high cognitive and emotional load, founders and leaders of high-growth ventures and scale-ups can experience chronic "performance pressure", ambiguity, and fatigue.

The time for start-up-level founder heroics is over. Scaling is a team sport if you want to play to win in the big leagues, not just the win the next game.

• Research on scaling ventures (e.g. Genedy et al., 2024, Journal of Business Venturing) finds that rapid scaling increases burnout and lowers job satisfaction across teams — especially when the pace outstrips systems and clarity.

• My own studies on scaling processes (Mula, Zybura & Hipp, 2024) describe a similar tension: balancing short-term wins with the organisational adaptation required to achieve long-term growth and strategic goals. Without deliberate investment in capabilities and capacity (people, processes, rhythm), scaling turns from flow to overload.

• Both domains show that stress is not inherently harmful — it’s the imbalance between demands and recovery that determines whether teams can continue the scaling journey and thrive, or fracture.

Lessons for Founders and Scale-Up Leaders

A healthy organisation and high-performing team rely on coping mechanisms — delivered through development and support staff, and good systems. Effective energy management is essential to avoid cognitive fatigue and negativity, which can lead to poor decision-making, staff exhaustion, increased dissatisfaction and cynicism, reduced coping ability, and ultimately, burnout. Heroics may help you win the start-up game, but scaling is a whole new league.

Here are 5 things you can do to apply elite team research to your scale-up organisation:

1. Monitor Load, Not Just Output.

   Like training data in sport, track early signals or leading indicators of overload in your team — turnover, reactivity, decision fatigue. Use “Love and Loathe” lists, frequent check-ins, and surveys monitoring mood, focus, and engagement.

2. Build Recovery Into the System.

   High-performance sports normalise recovery protocols; scale-ups rarely do. Protect non-negotiable rest and reflection time, especially after big sprints like funding rounds or product pushes.

3. Manage Travel and Context Switching.

   Just as time zones impair NBA defensive decision-making and reactions, rapid shifts between markets, teams, priorities, or focus sap cognitive performance. Design work cadence to reduce “context jet lag.”

4. Coach the Coaches.

   The people supporting and developing others — your leaders, managers, or trainers — also need ongoing development and coaching. They’re the equivalent of frontline performance staff. Their wellbeing directly influences execution quality.

5. Balance Challenge and Support.

   McLean’s research reinforces that growth depends on adaptive tension: enough stretch to drive excellence, and enough resources to recover and learn.

Whether it’s an NBA playoff or a Series B scale-up, sustainable elite performance comes from managing people, their energy, and the systems that support them — not just the scoreboard. McLean’s work shows that without intentional support for the team behind the team, even the world’s best organisations eventually decline in the long term and lose out to better-managed rivals.

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Blake McLean at CEO Summit 2026

To hear more, join Dr. Blake McLean and other global experts on scaling and innovation at the CEO Summit 2026 in Sydney on 19th & 20th May.

200+ CEOs, founders and owners will come together with the world’s sharpest minds in scaling and innovation.

Secure your seat here