The hardest moments usually aren’t the loudest ones.
As an Olympic athlete, a soldier and now a head coach, I’ve had my share of hard moments. Crashing a bobsled at 90 mph with no seatbelt or airbags. Leaving my family behind to deploy to Iraq. Driving a truck of sleds and weights 5,800 miles across the European Alps in the winter.
Those experiences tested me. But the moments that surprised me most rarely had to do with brawn or hard work. They were often the conversations nobody wanted to have.
Most leadership frameworks stop at “communicate well.” The great leaders I know go further. They get real, even when it costs something.
Candid communication is the most underrated skill in leadership. And what makes a hard conversation build trust instead of destroying it is whether the person can see the reason behind the decision. That takes honest delivery, a clear standard and objective evidence.
Prepare your why, not just your plan
Nothing goes exactly according to plan. That’s a clear lesson I’ve learned everywhere from the battlefield to the bobsled track.
Which is why preparation is the only rational response. Whether you’re going into combat, an Olympic race or a sales pitch that needs to land, things aren’t going to go the way you want them to. There might be hazardous weather. There might be a threat different than the one you planned for. You have to be able to react, and you can only react if you’ve thought it through hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
But contingency drills are the easy half. The harder half, and the one most leaders skip, is that you need to prepare your why.
The Army taught me candor, which has mattered more than almost any other skill. In Iraq, I learned that people can take bad news. Bad things happened. The only things we could count on were each other and the certainty that plans would break. What my leaders put in place before the bad news arrived was the why. Not just what we had to do, but the reasoning behind it.
Bringing a company together before a hard mission. Explaining to a pilot why we’re changing a line she’s driven for years. Sitting down with an athlete who isn’t where we need him to be. The move is the same no matter what room you’re in: This is the hard thing we have to do, here’s the reasoning and here’s an honest read of where you are.
Teams don’t fracture because the news is hard, whether it’s a squad, a sled crew or a leadership team. They fracture because the news arrives without a reason, or is sugarcoated. We badly underestimate what people can face if they understand what’s being asked of them and why it matters. Softening the message to spare someone isn’t respect, it’s avoidance. These hard conversations show you care about the person, not just the result.
Stack the small wins
As an athlete, you control the result. You are the decision, and your body is the variable. As a coach, you create the conditions for others to perform. You set the direction, but your team’s success is no longer about what your body can do.
I’ve never had less control than as a company commander or coach. But what I can control has never mattered more. No matter who you lead, your job isn’t just to lead them to the water. You have to trust them to drink.
That means creating the culture for them to win, and one they want to be part of. You do that in the quiet, hard moments. The early morning lifts. A hundredth at the start. The one-on-one you could have skipped. The after-action reviews that run long.
It isn’t glamorous. But it adds up.
Repeat the standard until it lands
The part I underestimated is repetition. I’m still amazed at how many times I have to repeat a standard before it lands. This isn’t a sign of failure. It’s the job.
You have to set the standard, communicate it, then repeat it, often over and over. You can’t hold someone accountable to a standard they don’t know, or that wasn’t communicated, and repetition is how we train every skill in this sport.
The same applies to any long-horizon goal. Keeping athletes motivated across a four-year cycle is no different from keeping soldiers going at the end of a long deployment, or a team building something nobody has built before.
“A standard you never say out loud is just a conversation you’ve decided not to have.”
—Chris Fogt, Head Coach, USA Bobsled
You stack small wins. And the small wins start with repeating yourself. Again and again. Not because no one is listening, and not because you’re not respected. You do it because people are human, including you.
Repeat yourself. You don’t sound silly. You sound like a leader.
Show the numbers, not just the verdict
It isn’t only on you to supply the why. This is where data earns its keep. It lets you give people the why behind the why.
In my world, that’s the difference between “I don’t think you’re the right fit” and “here is your sprint time, here is your push time, here is your measured performance against the standard.” They might still hate me in the moment. That doesn’t go away. What changes is that there’s less room to believe I was biased, because everything I’m telling them is grounded in evidence. The same swap works anywhere: “This isn’t working” becomes a number, backed by data you can both look at.
Data also removes the risk of the personal without making the conversation impersonal. It settles whether a decision was about who I like, because the evidence is sitting right there. That frees up room to help someone get better. None of that is any less true for a team using data for the first time, or the thousandth.
“Data doesn’t buy us more runs. It improves what we get out of the few we have.”
—Chris Fogt, Head Coach, USA Bobsled
I once sat down with an athlete who was performing well but under their potential. I showed them their strength and sprint numbers and what I thought those would translate to on the hill with more effort. They weren’t happy at first, but they worked harder. Their numbers improved the next season, and they were grateful I challenged them to get uncomfortable.
Across every arena I’ve worked in, this is what builds long-term trust in how decisions get made. The process is the point, because the process is what people live inside long after any single conversation ends.
Evidence earns something else, too. We get five or six runs to learn a track. That’s all the practice there is. Data doesn’t buy us more runs. It improves what we get out of the few we have.
Get closer with data
I’m a fortunate man, in large part because of my teachers. I go to work every day and get to learn from every single person at Team USA Bobsled/Skeleton.
The people I learned the most from were doing this long before I was. I trusted their instinct and coaching. Our ability now to capture and process data doesn’t change what they taught, it sharpens their process, and refines what they know.
Take our head pilot coach, who coached me through all three of my Olympic games. Until four years ago, electronics were banned in our sleds and the sport ran on feel. He has been in this sport since 1986, teaching the same curve the same way for decades. In some curves the data showed he was off by a hair. When we plotted it in a graph that was easy to understand, the correction became clear. That was the application we have been missing. A curve we had always driven with three waves was faster with two. Every wave can cost speed, so that isn’t a small correction. After 38 years, he updated and optimized his coaching.
We have never found a case where one of our coaches was wildly wrong. We have found plenty where we could sharpen our coaching. Knowing the difference, and having the data to back it up, is what keeps a program and a leader honest.
Another surprise was learning that experience didn’t predict who was willing to change. Some of the coaches who were unwilling to incorporate the data and change had half the experience as our coaches who accepted the change. If you assume your veterans will be the ones pushing back, you may have it backwards.
Elana has taught me the other half of it. She won by four-hundredths of a second at 41. Some of the data from that season contradicted what two decades of instinct were telling her, and she acted on it anyway. But she wasn’t just acting on new data. Her bravery and commitment to trying new things came from knowing her why, her larger commitment to becoming the best bobsledder she can be, and now the most decorated in U.S. history.
Data doesn’t lie. But it only tells you anything if you know how to read it. The judgment didn’t disappear when the numbers arrived. It improved. It used to take only experience to see the right line down a track. Now it takes experience to know which of a thousand data points matters. You can gather so much data that you freeze. I’ve watched it happen.
Better information walks you up to the conversation. But someone still has to sit down and clearly, candidly express the difficult thing out loud. Because a standard you never say out loud is just a conversation you’ve decided not to have. Evidence hasn’t made either one easier. It has only taken away the excuses.
