Leadership lessons from cricket are not metaphors I reached for because they sounded good in a LinkedIn post. They are the actual operating framework I was running on before I knew what an operating framework was.

I have spent the better part of my life on cricket fields — as a professional cricketer, as a captain, as someone who has sat in dressing rooms before high-pressure matches and watched how different people respond to uncertainty. I have also spent the last several years building Adherio, sitting across the table from founders of businesses worth ₹5 crore to ₹200 crore, and watching how they respond to the exact same pressures.

The parallels are not superficial. They are structural. The problems that cause a cricket team to underperform are, in most cases, the exact same problems that cause a business to underperform — and they respond to the same interventions.

Here is what the game has taught me about building teams, making decisions under pressure, and leading through uncertainty. Not as an extended metaphor. As a direct operating framework.

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Clarity of Role Is Everything — and It Is Always Underinvested

In cricket, every player knows their role with precision. The opener’s job is to see off the new ball, absorb pressure, and give the middle order good conditions to score. The finisher’s job is to maximise runs in the death overs regardless of the situation they inherit. The enforcer’s job is to take wickets at key moments, not to bowl beautifully. When everyone plays their defined role, the team functions as a system. When someone tries to play a role that is not theirs — the opener trying to play like a finisher, the spinner trying to bowl like a pacer — the system breaks.

I see the same dynamic in almost every business I work with. Marketing is trying to make supply chain decisions. Finance is second-guessing commercial strategy. The COO is doing the CEO’s job because the CEO has not clearly defined their own. Everyone is working hard. However, because role clarity does not exist, effort and effectiveness are not correlated.

The investment required to define roles precisely — to write down what each person owns, what they can decide independently, and what they need to bring to others — is far smaller than the cost of the friction that role ambiguity creates. In cricket, this clarity is built through years of team culture and explicit conversation between captain and player. In business, it requires a deliberate architecture: role charters, decision rights, and regular calibration.

The teams that win — in both contexts — are not necessarily the ones with the most talented individuals. They are the ones where every person knows exactly what they are supposed to do and does it without needing to check whether they are allowed to.

Pressure Reveals the System, Not Just the Individual

There is a version of cricket analysis that attributes everything to individual brilliance or individual failure. The great batsman held his nerve. The bowler cracked under pressure. This is satisfying narrative. However, it misses most of what is actually happening.

The real question in pressure moments is not whether individuals performed well. It is whether the system around them gave them the best possible conditions to perform. Did the captain make field placements that gave the bowler confidence? Did the team’s batting order put players in situations that matched their skills? Did the preparation — the game plan, the analysis, the practice sessions — give individuals the information and context they needed to make good decisions in real time?

Good systems make ordinary people perform like extraordinary ones. Bad systems make extraordinary people perform like ordinary ones. I have seen both in cricket and in business, and the pattern is identical.

When I sit with a founder who is frustrated that their team is not performing, my first question is never about the team. It is about the system. What does the team know? What have they been given? What does good look like, and has anyone told them? In most cases, the team is not the problem. The absence of a performance system around the team is.

The Captain’s Real Job Is Not to Make Every Decision

This is the lesson that took me the longest to learn — and that I now spend a significant part of my time trying to help founders learn.

A cricket captain who tries to control every decision on the field is a liability, not an asset. They cannot be in the right position for every ball while simultaneously monitoring twelve other things. They cannot process every piece of information available on the field while standing at mid-off. The captain’s job is to set the strategy, distribute responsibility to the right people, and intervene at the specific moments where their judgment changes the outcome.

The greatest captains I have observed are not the ones who call every field placement. They are the ones who have built enough trust and clarity with their team that the team makes the right calls without being asked. The captain’s intervention becomes precise and well-timed — a word to the bowler at the right moment, a reshuffle of the batting order when conditions change, a decision to take the new ball that the team was not going to suggest but clearly needed.

This is exactly the transition I try to help founders make. Not from being involved to being uninvolved. From being the decision-maker for everything to being the decision-maker for the things that only they can decide — and building a system that handles the rest.

Comebacks Require a Different Skill Set Than Arrival

I have made a comeback in cricket after a significant period away from the game. I am doing the same thing simultaneously in building Adherio — coming back to the operating arena after years building in a different context.

What both comebacks have taught me is that the skills required to rebuild are different from the skills that built the original thing. Arrival is about establishing yourself. Comeback is about being willing to be a student again — to acknowledge that conditions have changed, that you have changed, and that some of what worked before will not work now.

In cricket, the physical demands have not changed. However, the mental architecture of returning — the patience required, the willingness to accept a more measured approach rather than the aggressive game that felt natural before the break — is a different discipline. Similarly, building Adherio after years in a different operating context required a genuine reset: listening more than asserting, testing assumptions rather than acting on them, and being comfortable with the slower compound returns of building something properly rather than the faster visible returns of the game.

The founders I have the most productive conversations with are the ones who approach their scaling challenges with this kind of openness. Not the ones who are certain they know what the business needs and just need someone to execute it. But the ones who are willing to be challenged on their own operating model — who can hold their experience and instincts alongside the possibility that the system around them needs to change.

The Dressing Room Tells You Everything

Before a big match, the dressing room is diagnostic. You can feel the quality of a team’s culture in fifteen minutes of observation before a ball is bowled. Are players preparing individually or collectively? Is the senior leadership calm or anxious? Does the captain communicate with certainty or with hedging? Is the energy focused or scattered?

The business equivalent of the dressing room is the first weekly leadership meeting I observe with a new client. Within an hour, I have a reasonably precise read on how the business actually operates — not how the founder describes it, but how it functions in practice. Who defers to whom. Whether disagreement is aired or suppressed. Whether the conversation is about problems or about accountability for solving them. Whether the numbers on the table are being interrogated or accepted at face value.

In both contexts, the dressing room does not lie. Culture is not what an organisation says about itself. It is what happens when no one is explicitly performing for an audience.

What Both Paths Come Down To

I have been asked, more times than I can count, whether cricket or business is harder. The honest answer is that they are hard in the same way.

Both require clarity about what winning looks like. Both require a system that gives individuals the conditions to perform at their best. Both require a leader who knows when to act and when to create space for others. Both require the discipline to do the unglamorous preparation work that never appears in the highlight reel but determines the outcome of the contest.

And both, in the end, come down to execution. Not strategy. Not talent. Not intention. The ability to do what needs to be done, under conditions that are rarely ideal, with the resources actually available rather than the ones you would prefer to have.

That is what Adherio is built around. And it is what I learned — long before I knew I was learning it — on a cricket field.