Alberto Uncini Manganelli has spent his career at the intersection of elite sport and global business. What he’s learned about performance, pressure, and the leaders who last might be the most honest thing anyone has told you this year.
There is a version of high performance that most companies have on their walls. It lives in values statements, all-hands presentations, and the language leaders use when they want to sound serious about excellence. It is aspirational. It is also, Alberto Uncini Manganelli would argue, largely fictional.
Manganelli has spent decades in rooms where performance is not rhetorical—measured in split seconds, finishing positions, and market outcomes with nowhere to hide. As an executive who has led global organizations and worked alongside Olympic champions, he has watched both athletes and business leaders operate under genuine pressure, and noticed, with increasing clarity, the gap between what high performance looks like and what it actually requires.
“What is not visible externally… doesn’t exist. That’s a hard law of sport. Business is no different.”
Measuring the Wrong Things
The first thing Manganelli dismantles is the distinction many organizations draw between performance culture and results culture—as though caring about how people work is somehow more evolved than caring about what they produce. He doesn’t accept the premise. “The objective is the same: results. The difference is where you anchor performance.”
The problem, in his view, is that organizations have grown expert at measuring the wrong things. They track activity—hours logged, effort invested, meetings attended. These are internal metrics. Comforting ones. But in competitive environments, comfort is beside the point. “In sport, training matters—but only the time at the finish line defines the athlete.” Leaders who resist this framing are not protecting their people. They are protecting themselves.
“Leaders who suppress dialogue mistake intellectual confrontation for disloyalty. They create silent organizations that execute but don’t grow—and eventually, they break.”
What Separates Leaders Who Last
The leaders Manganelli has seen sustain effectiveness over time share three traits. The first is genuine curiosity—surrounding themselves with people who know more than they do and treating that as a structural advantage, not a threat. “Leaders who think they know everything may win short term. But they rarely build lasting organizations.”
The second is pulling rather than pushing: leading through vision and purpose instead of control and task lists. Motivation scales; task-pushing doesn’t. The third, and most counterintuitive, is inverting the pyramid—leading people so well that they begin to lead you, bringing ideas, challenging assumptions, improving the business from within. That’s where innovation lives.
The inverse is equally instructive. Leaders who mistake compliance for alignment don’t develop leadership—they select for obedience. What looks like a well-run operation is often a silent one, executing faithfully and growing not at all.
“Fear kills performance. Ambiguity kills it faster.”
Pressure Is the Prize
In most boardrooms, pressure is discussed as a risk factor—something to manage and distribute. Manganelli’s Olympic performers see it differently. “Pressure only exists where something meaningful is at stake.” Top athletes don’t experience pressure as threat. They experience it as proof they’ve earned the right to compete at a high level.
“The real risk is not pressure. It’s irrelevance.” Organizations that structure themselves to avoid high stakes aren’t protecting people from risk. They’re avoiding ambition—and the cost compounds quietly until it becomes structural. Pressure, reframed correctly, is not something that happens to you. It’s something you earn.
After failure, the best performers do three things consistently: they tell the truth, extract the learning, and reset fast. No drama, no blame. Just clarity—what happened, why, and what changes now. The accountability structures that work separate judgment from learning: hold people to outcomes and behaviors, but treat mistakes as data, not identity. “Failure only becomes toxic when it’s punished emotionally or ignored strategically.”
“Stop trying to protect comfort. Start protecting standards. Leaders don’t exist to remove friction. They exist to channel it productively.”
The Gap No One Names
The central failure of corporate performance culture, Manganelli believes, is not a lack of ambition—it’s a failure of operationalization. “Most companies celebrate high performance rhetorically—but operationalize comfort.” They talk about excellence while tolerating inconsistency. They speak the language of ambition and then, systematically, avoid the hard conversations that ambition requires.
He understands why. Hard conversations are effortful. Honest confrontation slows short-term execution. But the friction doesn’t disappear—it accumulates. “High performance only exists where standards are explicit and enforced—every day, not just in presentations. What you tolerate becomes the standard. Culture doesn’t change with slogans. It changes with decisions.”
At the highest level, everyone is talented. What differentiates performance over time is consistency, discipline, and the ability to improve under pressure. “If effort is optional, talent becomes fragile.” The gap between average and excellent will widen. Technology will amplify talent. But mindset will differentiate outcomes—and the leaders preparing now are building cultures capable of sustaining high standards under genuine pressure, with less certainty and higher expectations on every dimension.
Written in partnership with Tom White
