Most people think leadership in professional sports is loud.
They picture screaming coaches, broken clipboards, emotional locker-room speeches, and hard-nosed personalities barking orders until people fall in line. For many leaders in business, sports leadership gets dismissed entirely as entertainment. Too emotional. Too ego-driven. Too much testosterone and “jock culture” to have anything meaningful to teach someone running a company, leading a team, or managing real organizational complexity.
To be fair, sometimes that criticism is deserved.
There are certainly examples of leadership in sports that look more like intimidation than influence, and anyone who has spent enough time in organizations knows there are still leaders who confuse pressure with performance and fear with accountability. Yet if you have been paying close attention to Martin St-Louis and the Montreal Canadiens during this playoff run, I would argue something very different is unfolding in plain sight.
What we are watching is not intimidation leadership.
It is not performative toughness.
And despite how it may look to outsiders at times, it certainly is not “goon hockey” leadership.
What I see is something much more nuanced and, frankly, much more relevant to leaders outside of sports. I see someone trying to build trust, accountability, ownership, and belief inside one of the most pressure-filled environments in professional sports. Whether you care about hockey or not, there are lessons here worth paying attention to because pressure has a funny way of exposing who leaders really are.
Anyone can talk about culture when momentum is easy.
Anyone can say they trust their people when things are working.
Anyone can look composed when the scoreboard is tilted in their favour and criticism is nowhere to be found.
Leadership becomes visible when things start wobbling. When results slip. When scrutiny intensifies and the pressure to react emotionally starts pulling at decision-making. That is usually the moment where leaders stop leading intentionally and start leading emotionally.
And if you want to understand what leadership under pressure actually looks like, there are a few moments from this Canadiens playoff run worth paying attention to.
CALM IS CONTAGIOUS
On May 15 against Tampa Bay, the Canadiens found themselves in the kind of moment that quietly reveals leadership.
Rookie goaltender Jakub Dobeš had given up several early goals, momentum was moving in the wrong direction, and frustration inside the Bell Centre was beginning to build. In a city like Montreal, where every coaching decision immediately becomes debate material, there is enormous pressure to act. Fans expect action. Media expects action. Entire conversations start forming around what the coach should be doing.
Most leaders know this feeling, even if their version happens in a boardroom instead of an arena.
A project starts slipping.
A key employee struggles.
Results trend in the wrong direction.
Suddenly everyone is looking toward the leader waiting for movement, and often the expectation is not necessarily that the leader makes the right decision, but that they make a visible one.
That distinction matters.
Because under pressure, leaders often mistake movement for leadership.
This was the moment where Martin St-Louis caught my attention.
Instead of reacting emotionally, he leaned into expertise. After the game, St-Louis explained that the decision to leave Dobeš in net came after trusting goalie coach Éric Raymond’s assessment, emphasizing that he wanted to avoid making emotional decisions in the moment.
That struck me because too many leaders confuse authority with expertise.
There is a subtle but dangerous belief that develops when people move into leadership positions. Because they hold the title, they feel pressure to know more than everyone else. They begin believing that confidence means certainty and that asking for help somehow weakens credibility.
In reality, the strongest leaders I have worked with understood something very different.
Sometimes leadership means trusting the person closest to the problem.
The technical expert.
The specialist.
The operator who understands the situation more deeply than you do.
I have seen this repeatedly throughout my military career. Rank can quietly create the illusion that leaders are supposed to have every answer, and inexperienced leaders often fall into the trap of believing they must always be the smartest person in the room. The result is predictable: expertise gets ignored, teams stop speaking honestly, and bad decisions become more likely because hierarchy starts overpowering judgment.
What stood out to me in that Tampa game was not simply the decision itself. Hockey people can debate all day whether leaving Dobeš in was technically the right move.
That is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is the discipline behind the decision.
St-Louis appeared measured enough to avoid making a move simply because the environment demanded visible action. Instead of letting pressure dictate behaviour, he trusted expertise, stayed composed, and avoided emotional decision-making when emotions would have been entirely understandable.
This reminded me of something I write about in You Don’t Know Sh*t About Leadership: And Neither Do I called Don’t Leak Your Sh*t on the Team.
Because leaders leak.
Not intentionally, but consistently.
Stress leaks into conversations.
Frustration reshapes tone.
Fear quietly changes decision-making.
Before long, teams begin mirroring the emotional state of the person in charge, often without anyone consciously realizing it is happening. When leaders become reactive, people tighten up. Confidence shrinks. Initiative disappears. Eventually, hesitation replaces decisiveness.
That matters because calm, just like panic, is contagious.
And teams almost always mirror the emotional tone of the person leading them.
TRUST HAS TO BE GIVEN BEFORE IT IS EARNED
One of the biggest leadership lies we tell ourselves sounds perfectly reasonable at first:
“I’ll trust them when they prove they’re ready.”
The problem is that confidence rarely arrives before responsibility.
More often, confidence develops because responsibility was given.
When I watch how Martin St-Louis has handled this Canadiens roster, particularly with younger players, what stands out is not perfection. It is trust. Young players have been allowed to grow in meaningful situations instead of being overprotected from them. Mistakes happen, bad reads happen, and uncomfortable moments happen, yet players continue to receive opportunities.
That matters because the instinct for many leaders, especially when pressure rises, is control.
They shorten the leash.
Insert themselves into more decisions.
Protect themselves instead of developing their people.
And while understandable, it almost always creates dependence instead of growth.
Years ago, I worked with a young Major who constantly looked for reassurance before making decisions. Every recommendation came with hesitation, and every call seemed to require validation. Eventually, I realized I was unintentionally reinforcing the problem by continuing to provide answers.
At some point, I stopped.
Instead, I simply told him:
“You’ve got this. Go with your gut.”
And he did.
He made the decision and handled it exceptionally well.
Not because he suddenly became smarter overnight, but because someone finally trusted him enough to stop hovering over every choice.
That experience reinforced something I have seen repeatedly throughout leadership.
People often rise to the expectations leaders place on them.
But leaders who constantly rescue, control, or override people rarely create confident teams because confidence develops through ownership, not dependence.
Leadership is not about creating people who need you for every answer.
It is about creating people who can eventually operate without you.
And capability almost always requires trust before certainty exists.
CONNECTION IS NOT SOFT. IT IS STRATEGIC
The moment that will probably make some people dismiss this whole article is the chest-pound after the Tampa win.
I get it.
Martin St-Louis standing in the locker room channeling The Wolf of Wall Street, pounding his chest and feeding off the energy in the room, can easily look like exactly the kind of sports culture many serious leaders roll their eyes at. At surface level, it feels like the stereotype: loud, emotional, theatrical, and not exactly what most executives would point to as a leadership model.
But I think that interpretation misses what was actually happening.
After every Canadiens win, the team crowns a “Wolf of the Game.” There is a wolf hat, a ritual, and a shared moment that belongs to the players. What St-Louis did in that room was not about ego or performative toughness. It was about connection. He stepped into their culture instead of standing above it, and that distinction matters more than many leaders realize.
One of the mistakes leaders make as they move higher in responsibility is believing that distance automatically creates authority. Professional distance has its place. Boundaries matter. Standards matter. But when leaders become too removed from the lived experience of their people, they may preserve hierarchy while quietly losing connection.
People rarely give their full commitment to a title. They give it to a team, a mission, and a leader they believe is actually with them in the work. That does not mean acting like everyone’s buddy. It means understanding what matters to the team and being willing to participate in the culture you are trying to shape.
Military units understand this instinctively. Traditions, rituals, inside jokes, symbols, and shared language can look strange from the outside, but inside the team they reinforce belonging. They remind people that they are part of something distinct, something shared, and something worth carrying together.
That is why forced corporate culture often falls flat. You cannot manufacture belonging through a poster, a slogan, or a quarterly team-building event that everyone attends because their calendar told them to. Real culture forms through repeated moments that people actually care about, especially moments tied to shared struggle and shared success.
That wolf moment was not “goon hockey.”
It was a leader reinforcing belonging.
And belonging matters because people perform differently when they feel they are part of something real.
ACCOUNTABILITY WITHOUT FEAR
The strongest leadership lesson in all of this may be how St-Louis appears to approach mistakes.
Too many leaders still believe accountability means punishment. They think fear creates standards, pressure creates performance, and public correction proves they are serious. The problem is that fear rarely produces the kind of performance leaders actually want. It may create short-term compliance, but over time it usually produces hesitation.
And hesitation kills performance.
In combat, hesitation can get people hurt. In business, hesitation kills innovation and slows decision-making. In hockey, hesitation usually ends up in the back of your net.
I have seen this dynamic repeatedly in military and organizational settings. When people become afraid of being wrong, they do not suddenly become better thinkers. They become more cautious. They start protecting themselves. They wait longer to make decisions, seek unnecessary approval, and spend more energy avoiding blame than solving the actual problem.
Eventually, the leader who wanted accountability gets dependence instead.
This is where St-Louis’ approach to mistakes is worth studying. From the outside, he appears to treat mistakes as part of development rather than as proof that someone cannot be trusted. That does not mean mistakes are ignored. It does not mean standards disappear. It means the purpose of correction is learning, not humiliation.
That distinction is everything.
In the military, we use After Action Reviews for a reason. The purpose is not to gather everyone in a room and find someone to blame. The purpose is to understand what happened, why it happened, what worked, what failed, and what needs to change next time. A good AAR is not soft. In fact, it can be brutally honest. But the honesty is aimed at improvement, not punishment.
That is where many leaders get accountability wrong.
Punishment asks, “Who screwed this up?”
Leadership asks, “What do we learn from this, and how do we get better?”
Those two questions create entirely different teams. One creates defensiveness. The other creates ownership.
In You Don’t Know Sh*t About Leadership: And Neither Do I, I come back to this idea again and again because I have seen the cost of leaders who confuse blame with accountability. Teams under blame-based leadership may look disciplined from the outside, but internally they become cautious, guarded, and slow. People stop offering ideas. They stop raising risks early. They stop making decisions at the level they should because being wrong feels more dangerous than staying quiet.
That is not accountability.
That is fear dressed up as standards.
True accountability requires honesty, but it also requires enough trust for people to admit what happened without immediately going into self-protection mode. That is the environment where learning happens. That is where development happens. And that is where teams become more resilient because mistakes are no longer treated as the end of confidence, but as part of the process of building it.
GREAT LEADERS CREATE BELIEF BEFORE RESULTS EXIST
The biggest thing I see in Montreal right now is belief.
Not hype.
Not blind optimism.
Belief.
There is a difference.
Hype is emotional and temporary. It rises when things go well and disappears the moment pressure returns. Belief is deeper. Belief is what allows a team to stay in the fight when momentum swings, criticism builds, and the easy story would be that they are too young, too inexperienced, or not ready yet.
That is why this Canadiens run is interesting from a leadership perspective. It is not just about systems, tactics, line combinations, or goaltending decisions. Those things matter, of course. But what leaders should be paying attention to is the way this team appears to be growing into something while under pressure.
Young roster.
Heavy scrutiny.
A demanding market.
Real mistakes.
Real consequences.
And still, there appears to be belief.
That does not happen accidentally.
Leaders create belief long before results fully justify it. They do it by staying calm when pressure rises, trusting expertise instead of protecting ego, giving responsibility before people feel completely ready, connecting to the team in ways that create belonging, and treating mistakes as opportunities to improve rather than reasons to shame.
That is the deeper leadership pattern here.
It is not one speech.
It is not one locker-room moment.
It is not one decision behind the bench.
It is the accumulation of behaviours that teach a team what kind of environment they are operating in.
When leaders repeatedly show calm, people learn they do not need to panic. When leaders trust people with responsibility, people begin to see themselves as capable. When leaders participate in the team’s culture, people feel seen. When leaders correct mistakes without humiliation, people become more willing to take ownership.
Over time, those behaviours become belief.
And belief changes how teams perform.
Whether the Canadiens ultimately win or lose almost misses the point. Of course winning matters. It is professional sports. Results count. But leadership is not measured only by the final outcome. Sometimes leadership is measured by what a team becomes while pressure is trying to break it.
That is what makes Martin St-Louis worth studying.
Not because hockey has all the answers.
Not because every business leader should start copying sports culture.
And definitely not because chest-pounding belongs in your next executive meeting.
The lesson is deeper than that.
The lesson is that leadership under pressure is revealed through behaviour. It is revealed in whether you react emotionally or stay disciplined. It is revealed in whether you trust expertise or protect ego. It is revealed in whether you develop people or control them. It is revealed in whether your culture is real or just words on a wall. It is revealed in whether mistakes become learning or fear.
That is true in hockey.
It is true in business.
It is true in the military.
And it is true in every team where pressure eventually shows up.
The question is not whether your team will face pressure. It will.
The real question is what your team is learning from you when that pressure arrives.
FINAL WORD
I do not know how far this Canadiens team will go.
I do not know whether this playoff run becomes a stepping stone, a turning point, or just another chapter in the long history of Montreal hockey.
But I do know this:
There is leadership happening there worth paying attention to.
Not the loud, lazy stereotype of sports leadership. Not intimidation dressed up as toughness. Not emotion pretending to be strategy.
Something more useful.
A leader staying calm under pressure. A leader trusting expertise. A leader giving young people room to grow. A leader stepping into the culture of the team rather than standing above it. A leader treating mistakes as part of development without removing accountability.
That is not just hockey.
That is leadership.
And for any leader watching closely, there is a simple question worth sitting with:
When pressure rises, does your team become more confident because of your leadership, or more cautious because of your reaction?
If that question makes you pause, good.
That pause is where leadership growth starts.
Many of these ideas are explored more deeply in my book, You Don’t Know Sh*t About Leadership: And Neither Do I, where I break down what leadership actually looks like when ego, pressure, accountability, trust, and uncertainty collide in the real world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott McCarthy is a senior Canadian Army officer, leadership coach, and founder of Moving Forward Leadership. He currently commands a military unit responsible for complex operations and multimillion-dollar assets while coaching leaders across industries to build credibility, discipline, and trust.
He is the author of You Don’t Know Sh*t About Leadership: And Neither Do I and host of the Peak Performance Leadership podcast. Scott’s work centers on the 3 Domains of Leadership — Leading Yourself, Leading Your Team, and Leading Your Organization — helping leaders replace ego-driven reactions with disciplined, accountable action.
When he’s not leading in uniform or coaching executives, he’s refining systems, training hard, and continuing the same work he asks of others: getting better, one decision at a time.