‘Treat Your Career Like an Elite Athlete Treats Training’: The Best Advice for Working Your Way Up in Business
Joe Drygas is charged with connecting a massive number of people in a vast array of industries. As Vice President of AT&T’s Global Enterprise Business, his efforts link up everything from healthcare to retail to sports to energy. His key to conquering so many different spaces? “The best employees treat their careers like how elite athletes treat training,” he told Entrepreneur. “If you’re a quarterback, your career evolution often changes how you play the game — how much you run versus throw, where you focus your training on speed, strength, or flexibility, and how your role shifts from starter to mentor for the new QB.” In short, he says, “Every new role requires a new version of you.” Here are Drygas’s keys to transformation within a company.
Dan Bova: What are some of the keys for successfully reinventing yourself in new roles at the same company?
Joe Drygas: It starts with a mindset — the best employees realize that they need to constantly change and reinvent themselves, like refreshing their skills, their network and operating rhythm. It’s the same way an NFL quarterback evolves his game and role within the team. I’ve been at AT&T for 25 years, and I started in inside sales and worked my way up through the organization. The only way that’s possible is by accepting that every new role requires a new version of you.
What’s something small, like a daily routine or mindset shift, that changed the way you lead or perform?
It sounds counterintuitive, but paying attention to your schedule for an extra minute or two a day, and scheduling all the personal things, like workouts, meals and sleep, makes a leader much calmer. The uncertainty of “Will I get in this run?” or “What time will I really get to sleep?” is reduced if you schedule it, and the cognitive overload of “once I’m done with work, I can think about what my evening or weekend looks like” isn’t creating optimal clarity or stability. Your mind can release, your confidence grows, and especially when you’re on the road—it gives you a clear arc for your day.
Tell us about your problem-solving method.
We have to move faster and more efficiently than our competitors, and a recent challenge is getting a very experienced team to change the way they work in the AI era. I’ve realized that driving real adoption of new technologies and tools requires a top-down approach. Transformation isn’t a memo—it’s a pattern of visible behaviors that start at the top. If you want adoption, you need to use the tools live in front of them, not just talk about them. I do skip-level sessions with managers where I walk them through the tools in real time and show exactly how I’m using them to run the business and hold myself accountable. They need to see the pace car right up front.
How do you think AI will transform the healthcare industry?
AI can close the care gap because data can both bring down costs and expand the way we understand the patient, from the hospital to the clinic to home and on the go. It helps us train and give care remotely, allowing that care to travel long distances. For entrepreneurs, this teaches you that heuristics are key, but they can keep things local. If you can turn them into rails, they become universal and can travel farther distances. If we are pioneering remote surgery for regions where there aren’t the same specialists, then any business can take their offerings global too.
And what’s your appraoch to the customer side of solving pain points?
Customers want to be heard, and building your meeting agenda around what could be improved is a really strong way to let them see it’s a priority. I go back to things they’ve asked for before and ask if they’ve improved; I research how their industry or business is doing and ask if these are things they’re seeing and how we can help; I make clear that we should talk about it in the meeting and that we can’t fix everything on the spot so I’ll also follow up with them with a plan. Ironically, building an agenda that’s about them is the best way to show you’re not blinded by your own agenda.
Joe Drygas is charged with connecting a massive number of people in a vast array of industries. As Vice President of AT&T’s Global Enterprise Business, his efforts link up everything from healthcare to retail to sports to energy. His key to conquering so many different spaces? “The best employees treat their careers like how elite athletes treat training,” he told Entrepreneur. “If you’re a quarterback, your career evolution often changes how you play the game — how much you run versus throw, where you focus your training on speed, strength, or flexibility, and how your role shifts from starter to mentor for the new QB.” In short, he says, “Every new role requires a new version of you.” Here are Drygas’s keys to transformation within a company.
Dan Bova: What are some of the keys for successfully reinventing yourself in new roles at the same company?
Joe Drygas: It starts with a mindset — the best employees realize that they need to constantly change and reinvent themselves, like refreshing their skills, their network and operating rhythm. It’s the same way an NFL quarterback evolves his game and role within the team. I’ve been at AT&T for 25 years, and I started in inside sales and worked my way up through the organization. The only way that’s possible is by accepting that every new role requires a new version of you.
What’s something small, like a daily routine or mindset shift, that changed the way you lead or perform?
It sounds counterintuitive, but paying attention to your schedule for an extra minute or two a day, and scheduling all the personal things, like workouts, meals and sleep, makes a leader much calmer. The uncertainty of “Will I get in this run?” or “What time will I really get to sleep?” is reduced if you schedule it, and the cognitive overload of “once I’m done with work, I can think about what my evening or weekend looks like” isn’t creating optimal clarity or stability. Your mind can release, your confidence grows, and especially when you’re on the road—it gives you a clear arc for your day.