When I decided to work on a PhD in leadership, it didn’t take long to settle on a research topic. As an ex-CEO and a marathon runner, I had to find out if there was a connection between leaders’ effectiveness and their passionate non-work interests.

The subject of “serious leisure” was not new to career coaches and to the popular press, but academic research had been virtually silent about it. With my research team, we started by inventorying public information on the serious leisure of top CEOs (those leading companies included in the S&P 500 index, the largest listed corporations in the US) and on how these CEOs see the contribution of their passionate hobbies to their leadership.

Read more at: https://www.london.edu/lbsr/how-athletic-hobbies-benefit-womens-leadership