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Check out the 7 C’s to build a winning team in business, sports, & life:
#1: Culture
Culture drives expectations and beliefs; expectations and beliefs drive behavior; behavior drives habits; and habits create the future. It all starts with culture.
Mike Smith urges others to “Build your culture up and down. I’ve always believed that culture is defined and created from the top down, but it comes to life from the bottom up. To have sustained success, we needed a winning organizational culture, and I knew that by working closely with the leadership group to define and set the culture, we would be able to have that. I also knew that to create a successful team on the field, I needed to involve more than just leadership, players, and staff. We needed everyone in the organization to buy in.”
Culture consists of the shared purpose, attitudes, values, goals, practices, behaviors, and habits that define a team or organization.
As a leader, it is so important that your words equal your actions. It is imperative that you make sure that you go through a self-evaluation process on an almost daily basis to make sure that your actions are in line with your words. You must do what you say and say what you do.
The most overlooked aspect in team sports, and what most coaches and leaders fail to grasp, is the fact that it is your culture that will determine whether your strategy works and is sustainable. It is the culture you create that is going to determine whether your players perform and execute.
The strategies and game plans are going to change from week to week. In the face of all this, it is your culture that will be the driving force to create the resiliency, toughness, passion, and attitude to overcome the obstacles in your way.
You must spend more time on building your culture than on everything else. Culture is what produces wins over time. If you are looking to build a new culture or transform the one you have, the first questions you should ask yourself are, “What do we stand for?” and “What do we want to be known for?”
As Mike Smith put it, “Knowing what you stand for is essential. From the moment I took over as the coach of the Atlanta Falcons, I knew the kind of culture we needed to create and I defined it for the team. The seven responsibilities everyone had were to:
- Have fun, work hard, and enjoy the journey.
- Show respect for every person you have contact with in the organization.
- Put the team first. Successful teams have teammates that are unselfish and willing to put their individual goals behind the team’s goals.
- Do your job. It is defined, but you must always be prepared for it to change (especially if you’re a player).
- Appropriately handle victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation. Do not get too high in victory or too low in defeat.
- Be the same person every day. Understand that all organizational decisions aim to make the team better, stronger, and more efficient.
- Have a positive attitude. Use positive language (both verbal and body language).”
Sometimes success can be your worst enemy if you allow it to change your culture and approach. Jon Gordon often says that if you focus on the fruit and ignore the root, the tree will die, but if you continue to care for the root and focus on your culture, process, people, and purpose, then you’ll always have a great supply of fruit.
Smith explained, “We stopped setting milestones and only focused on getting back to the playoffs. If we didn’t make it to the Super Bowl, the season would be considered a failure by the media, our fan base, and many within our organization. The pressure was on, and all of us felt it—our ownership, our quarterback, our team, and me—and, looking back, I allowed the pressure to steer us away from the very things that made us successful. I didn’t fight enough for our culture. I stopped building the culture up and down.”
Smith continued, “When unnamed sources and news leaks started happening, I didn’t fight for the team like I should have. I thought that if we won, the leaks and news would go away. I was focused on the outcome instead of fighting for my team and culture. I should have called an urgent meeting with our leadership team, addressed the news leaks, and demanded that whoever was doing it needed to stop sabotaging his own team. Instead of hoping that winning would solve the situation, I should have not let this situation happen. I helped create our culture and I should have fought for it until the end. I have made many mistakes along the way. No leader is perfect. But this was one mistake I wish I could do over. It’s one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned, and one that I can share with you so you don’t make the same mistake. That’s why I want to encourage you to build your culture, value it, live it, reinforce it, and fight for it.”
Focus on the process and don’t let outside or inside forces sabotage your culture. Smith’s first five years as Head Coach of the Atlanta Falcons are an indication of what happens when you stay true to your culture and process, and his last two years are a great example of what happens when you don’t.
#2: Contagious
Leadership is a transfer of purpose, passion, optimism, and belief. You are either broadcasting positive energy or negative energy, apathy or passion, indifference or purpose. Research from Harvard University also supports that idea that the emotions you feel are contagious and affect the people around you.
Each member of your team is contagious and every day you all are either sharing positive or negative energy with each other. Great cultures are built with positive contagious energy so it’s essential that you and your team share it. When you walk into the locker room, the office, or onto the field, you have a decision to make: Are you going to be a germ to your team or a big dose of vitamin C?
Your vision and mission should be simple, clear, bold, and compelling. General Motors rejuvenated their mission, brand, and sales with a simple focused vision and mission, “To design, build and sell the world’s best vehicles.”
A vision and mission should include the greatness you want to chase with a focus on the character traits and purpose that inspire you to get there. Research shows that people are most energized when they are contributing to a bigger cause beyond themselves.
Pete Carroll said, “The world trains people to be pessimistic…one of the most important things I must do here is to make sure my players and staff believe that tomorrow will be better than today.”
Manju Puri and David Robinson at Duke University found that optimistic people work harder, get paid more, win at sports more regularly, get elected to office more often, and live longer! It turns out that being positive is not just a nice, feel-good way to live but is, in fact, the way to live if you want better health, more meaningful relationships, and greater individual and team success.
When asked how Clemson has achieved at least 10 wins in each of the past four seasons for the first time in school history, Coach Dabo Swinney responded:
Like Apple founder Steve Jobs, he inspires them to believe they can do more, create more, and become more than they ever thought possible.
Your culture will come to life through the leaders and people in your locker room. Make sure you have the right team members to strengthen your culture instead of people who suck the energy out of it. You can do everything right as a leader and coach, but if you don’t have positive mentors and team members in the locker room your culture and team will fall apart.
To build a winning team you must create a positive culture where negativity can’t breed and grow, and the sooner you start weeding it from your team the stronger and more positively contagious your culture and team will be.
Mike Smith reported that after reading Jon Gordon’s book The No Complaining Rule, he created a No Complaining Training Camp. The entire team was given the book for their summer reading and Smith gave the guys bracelets with “No Complaining” on them and told the team that they weren’t allowed to complain. If they had a complaint, they could bring it to Coach Smith only if they also had a suggested solution to the complaint. Smith wanted to ensure the Falcons were going to be a positive team who stayed upbeat through the long, hot August weather in Atlanta.
What we think matters. Our words are powerful. Our body language is always being evaluated. The energy we share with our teammates and co-workers is essential. If you are complaining, you are not leading. If you are leading, you are not complaining. Great leaders are positively contagious and leaders should spend more time sharing a positive vision, belief, attitude, and encouragement with their teams.
#3: Consistent
If you are not consistent, you will lose the trust your team has in you. When you lose trust, you lose the locker room.
As a leader you must be consistent in your leadership style, approach, attitude, philosophy, and tactics. The key is to be who you are and coach the way you do all year long no matter what your win–loss record is. Your team must know what to expect from you.
The character you possess during the drought is what your team will remember during the harvest.
When you are moody, people around you don’t know what to expect from you and this causes them to lose trust in you. To build a winning team, you want to be consistent in your attitude, effort, and actions.
Be the kind of leader everyone knows they can trust and count on.
The best of the best always have this one trait: the desire to be great. Your desire is measured by your routine and preparation. Every team and organization must guard against the disease of complacency. You become complacent when team members start to believe that their prior successes are going to ensure that they will have success in the future.
Smith reflects, “We stopped focusing on the process as a team and organization. We ended up the season with a 4-12 record, when we had finished the previous season hosting the NFC Championship game. Instead of allowing the guys to think they were going to automatically get back to the playoffs, the NFC Championship game, and even the Super Bowl, I should have done what I had done in previous years: create more urgency, focus on our desire to be great, identify what we need to do to improve, and most importantly focus on the process, not the outcome.”
When you focus on the process instead of the destination, you make your desire to be great your number-one priority, so you won’t allow the disease of complacency to set in. What you want is consistent improvement, consistent coaching, and a consistent desire to be great.
Bill Walsh, one of the greatest football coaches of all time, would often say that he feared success—not failure. He worried that once a player or team had success they would become complacent and stop striving to get better.
Each year, the best teams recommit themselves to being better than they were the year before. The fact is, past success does not determine future success. Future success is the result of how you work, prepare, and practice and how you strive to improve each day.
Two words that characterize a team that is always improving and growing are “humble” and “hungry.” (Check out my summary of Brad Lomenick’s H3 Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry. Always Hustle.)
Be Humble
Don’t think you know it all. See yourself as a life-long learner who is always seeking ways to learn, grow, and improve. Be open to new ideas and strategies to take your work and team to the next level.
Be Hungry
Seek out new ideas, new strategies, and new ways to push yourself and your team out of your comfort zone. Don’t rest on past laurels. Make your next work your best work.
#4: Communicate
When there is a void in communication, negativity will fill it. Fill the void with great communication.
Communication is the foundation of every great relationship. Communication builds trust. Trust generates commitment. Commitment fosters teamwork, and teamwork delivers results.
To build trust, the key is to meet with your leadership team and the people you lead directly, and then make sure they are communicating well with the people they lead. If everyone does this throughout the organization, relationships, teamwork, and performance will improve dramatically.
The only way to really get to know your team and have them know you is to interact with them one on one. When you listen and hear what your team members are saying, you open the lines of communication and develop a team that is “all in.” Your team feels heard and buys in to your leadership because they know and feel that they are a part of the process of building and sustaining success.
One of the keys to listening and communicating is to ask the right people the right questions.
Just as Abraham Lincoln would ask his advisors questions and receive different ideas and competing strategies before eventually making his decisions, coaches and all leaders must do the same.
You have to engage people who are closest to the potential challenges facing your organization. You have to ask questions, listen, and learn, and then decide how to use the readings to make decisions going forward.
The most effective leaders are the ones who are mobile and visible throughout the building, not just in the office but also in the training room, locker room, and cafeteria. Beyond one-on-one communication, a big part of any coach’s job is to share key messages, themes, and principles with your team. Each year, the Falcons had a theme for the season that was presented to the team during the off-season. The Falcons also had weekly themes and messages that were presented at the Wednesday team meetings that were applicable to the upcoming game.
Reinforce these themes and messages over and over again, almost until they become annoying to the players. It is also essential that the leadership team (e.g., the assistant coaches) also share and reinforce the same messages with the team. The message can’t come from only one person and you can’t have different messages coming from different leaders. Every leader in the organization must be echoing the same beliefs and sharing the same message, especially the mentors and leaders in the locker room.
It’s also key to have outside voices reinforce the messages and themes that you are sharing. A CEO once told Gordon, “Jon, never underestimate the power of an outside voice.”
Research says that you can’t be stressed and thankful at the same time. So breathe, practice gratitude, and in the midst of busyness find mindful moments of calm to make communication and connection happen. You and your team will be glad you did.
Communication without collaboration can lead to underperformance, but when you have a collaborative team that works closely together in an effort to be great, you produce something very special. Collaborative teams and organizations are also much better prepared to deal with the ever-changing dynamics that are caused by both internal and external factors.
#5: Connect
Team beats talent when talent isn’t a team.
When you have stronger connections, you have a more committed and powerful team. A connected team becomes a committed team. Connection is the key to becoming a great team. And a lack of connection between team members leads to below-average teamwork and sub-par performance and results.
When a coach and team connect with each other, commitment, teamwork, chemistry, and performance improve dramatically.
The technology that is meant to help us can harm us if we let it. The same goes for our connected devices. We have so many different ways that we can communicate with one another, but unfortunately we are connecting less meaningfully. We are designing machines that function like people and, in turn, are turning people into machines.
As a team you must recognize the importance of connecting with each other and identify ways you can make these connections happen. You might have a no-phone zone, or a no-phone time during road trips to encourage conversation.
Young athletes today frequently communicate through devices and if coaches and leaders want to connect with them, we have to adapt and contact them in this way. However, it should be in addition to one-on-one conversations where you can look people in the eye and have a meaningful heart-to-heart and truly connect. This is where real relationships and connections are developed. Social media and texting simply allow you to develop and strengthen this connection if utilized the right way.
We live in a world filled with busyness and stress, and when you are going through life at 100 miles per hour, the last thing you want to do is connect with people—but it’s the most important thing you can do to build a great team.
A lot of teams use Gordon’s one-word exercise (for more about that, check out my post entitled What is Your One Word for 2018?) where each team member chooses a word for the year and commits to living that word.
Connect Outside the Locker Room to Be Strong Inside the Locker Room
As Mike Smith put it, “To truly connect as a team it’s also important to connect outside the locker room.”
Once you develop a connection with your team members, it’s important to make sure you stay connected. It’s so easy to take your connection for granted. Help your players stay connected with each other. The connection you create today will be the bond that strengthens your team tomorrow.
#6: Commitment
It’s not about you. It’s about committing yourself to your team.
Smith explains, “When talking to my team about commitment I like to tell them about the hen and pig and their roles in breakfast. The hen is involved in creating the eggs for breakfast, but the pig is committed.”
A leader must do a self-evaluation to make sure that his or her level of commitment is greater than that of anyone else in the organization. When you are committed, everyone knows it and your team feels it.
Feeling is more powerful than hearing. Your team must feel your commitment. Not just hear it. When we hear from a leader, we will learn; but when we feel a leader’s commitment, we will be transformed.
A team feels a leader’s commitment when the leader takes the time to serve them. Jesus washed feet; Martin Luther King marched; Mother Teresa fed the poor and healed the sick.
You can’t serve yourself and your team at the same time. You have to decide whether you are going to serve me or we. You must decide if you are going to be a self-serving “leader” or a true leader who serves others.
When leaders become focused on the fruit instead of the root and worry about the outcome instead of the process of developing team members, they may survive in the short run, but they will not thrive in the long run. Self-serving leaders don’t leave legacies that change the world for the better.
Commitment Is Spelled T-I-M-E
All success starts with making the team around you better. When you focus on helping others improve, you improve.
To be a successful leader you have to have an ego that drives you to be great, but you must give up your ego and serve your team in order to be great. You must lose your ego so you can stop focusing on yourself and start focusing on your team. After all, humility doesn’t mean you think less of yourself.
One rule of thumb is that you have to care more about what your team thinks about you than what the forces outside the locker room think of you. Whether you are a business leader, school leader, or non-profit leader, never throw your team under the bus. Don’t try to make them look bad so you can look good. No matter what occurs, never put blame on your players or coaches.
Remember, as the leader of the team or organization, the buck stops with you. As the great NBA coach Chuck Daly would say, shout praise in public and whisper criticism in private.
The ultimate commitment is sacrifice. To build a great team, your team has to know and feel that you would run into a burning building to save them. They have to know that you are willing to sacrifice yourself for their gain.
#7: Care
Relationships are the foundation upon which winning teams are built, and all great relationships are based on value, respect, love, trust, and care.
Caring is one of the greatest success strategies of all. The greatest organizations on the planet care about the work they do, the products they create, and the services they provide.
When you care, you stand out in a world where so many seem like they don’t care.
Jon Gordon remarked, “When I spoke to the Pittsburgh Pirates last year I asked the players, ‘Who here believes they can work harder than they currently do?’ Every guy on the team raised his hand and every person on every team I have asked since, also raise their hands. The next question naturally is, ‘If you know you can work harder, then why don’t you?’ The answer: to work harder you have to care more. When you care more, you give a little more time, a little more effort, a little more energy, and a little more love to the things and people you care about. You may be a good team, but to be a great team you have to care more.”
The Pirates, like Southwest Airlines, Northwestern Mutual, and many great companies have discovered that it’s not the numbers that motivate people. It’s the culture, caring, and purpose that drive the numbers. If you want to win, you don’t focus on winning. You focus on the culture, people, and process that produce wins.
To build a winning team it’s essential to build a culture of caring. To build a culture of caring you must be a leader who cares. Caring is the ultimate team-building strategy. People make it complicated but it’s simple: Care about the work you do. Surround yourself with people who care. Show your team you care about them. Build a team that cares about one another. Together show your customers/fans/students/patients that you care about them.
The best indicator that people care is not what they say about themselves, but what others say about them. Do others say you care? Can they identify ways that you care?
You have to remind yourself that under each uniform or business suit is a person who has challenges, personal issues, pain, hurt, and human wants and needs. Every person, no matter how successful, wants to be appreciated, respected, and valued. Everyone wants to feel cared about. Everyone, ultimately, wants to be loved.
It’s your job as a leader to know and love your team members. Even with all the pressure to win and succeed, always remember that it’s through relationships and human connections that this happens.
Relationships are the foundation upon which winning teams are built, and all great relationships are based on value, respect, love, trust, and care.
Transformational coaches see their role as a transformer of lives who helps each team member become the best version of him or herself. Transformational leaders believe their job is to serve their team members in order to help them grow in skill and character.
Gordon believes in tough love, but love must come first. If your team knows that you care about them, they will allow you to push and challenge them to be their best. The great leaders Gordon has worked with over the years practice love tough, not tough love.
Dabo Swinney’s caring trademark is the belief he instills in his players—he believes in them so much that they believe in themselves.
The key is to create your own caring trademark to fit you. So think about who you are and what you stand for. Identify ways you love to show you care. Decide how you want to make a difference. What do you want to be known for? Your caring trademark should express who you are, demonstrate your values in action, and reflect your mission to make a difference and serve others.
One of the great benefits of caring, besides developing great relationships with your team, is that it is contagious. When you care, your team will care. When you care, you will build a team that cares and plays hard regardless of their record. Over time, this creates consistency of effort, which creates long-term success.
The Model: The 7 C’s to Build a Winning Team and the 2 Big C’s that Drive the Process
Now more than ever, leaders must coach the teams they lead to help them grow and become better leaders. True leaders don’t create followers. They create more leaders. And this is accomplished through great coaching.
By coaching up and coaching down you create your culture. By coaching with optimism and positivity you become contagious.
Great coaches succeed not because they are great, but because they bring out the greatness in others. You can utilize the 7 C’s to become a Big C and start coaching today.
Without Character, you can’t coach a team to be successful, you can’t build a great culture, and the other C’s don’t work very well. Character drives talent toward greatness. If you have people who are humble, hungry, hard working, honest, dedicated, selfless, loyal, passionate, and accountable they will be the kind of people who develop their talent and make the right decisions to benefit themselves and the team. Character guides and drives your team members to be their best and bring out the best in others.
Remember and heed this warning: if you have someone who isn’t willing to improve, and he’s making decisions detrimental to himself and the team, then you will have no choice but to let him off the team. If someone is going to crash, don’t let him hurt the rest of the team.
Character doesn’t just build great teams. More importantly, it builds great people.
Always remember that there’s tremendous power generated from leading with integrity. It may not be manifested this year or next, but over time this power will lead to powerful results. There’s only one way to build a winning team and that’s the right way. Stay the course. Lead with integrity. Do the right thing. You’ll be glad you did.
When Smith became the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, he borrowed ideas, routines, and principles from the great leaders he worked with and admired but created a framework and approach that fit his leadership style and personality. Smith took all the experiences and lessons he learned over the years and made them his own.
You have to be yourself. Everyone else is taken. Create your own style that fits who you are and you will have a much greater chance of building a winning team.
Macro-leadership involves culture, vision, strategy, and the ability to lead at the organizational level, while micro-leadership involves leading at the team and individual levels.
No matter what role you play in your organization, you can lead from where you are and help your leaders be their best. A big part of leadership is leading from where you are and influencing people around you regardless of your title, rank, or position.
Coach John Wooden shared his philosophy when he said, “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing that you made the effort to do the best of which you are capable. If you truly do your best, and only you really know, then you are successful and the actual score is immaterial whether it was favorable or unfavorable.”
John Wooden focused on the process, not the outcome. In fact, he never focused on winning. He focused on the culture, process, principles, people, and team building that produce wins. As a result, he won a lot.
Past failure does not determine future failure. Past success does not determine future success.
Consider this way of thinking about a “Loss”: Learning Opportunity, Stay Strong.
The longer you allow people from your old culture to contaminate your new culture, the longer it takes to change and build a team. If you want to build a winning team, you have to make sure everyone is all-in and you can’t allow negative people from your old culture to impact the new mindset you are trying to build.
The focus should be on developing champions. To build a winning team, spend all your time and energy developing champions. To build a winning team, you’ll need to help reframe situations and events from negative to positive.
Leaders put stress on their teams when they place expectations on them that are beyond the players’ control. Focusing on outcomes such as goals, wins, points, and so on creates stress because you can’t control how many wins you will have or how many points you will score.
Apply pressure when it comes to your team’s effort, work ethic, knowledge of the playbook, preparation, process, and other things they can control, such as the fundamentals and teamwork. This is the approach John Wooden and Vince Lombardi took, and your team will perform better if you follow suit. As a leader you want to apply pressure, not stress.
Become a Lifelong Learner
Instead of relying on only your own experiences, take advantage of the opportunity to always advance yourself by learning from the experiences of others.
Every coach at every level should seek out other leaders to learn from. The minute you think you know it all is the moment that you stop growing and improving.
The Action Plan: Utilize the 7 C’s to Build a Winning Team and Organization
- Create your culture. Identify what you and your team stand for. Once you know what you stand for, decisions are easy to make. Remember that to build a great culture you have to build it, live it, value it, reinforce it, and fight for it.
- Be positively contagious. Decide to be a big dose of Vitamin C instead of a germ. Create and share a powerful vision, mission, and purpose with your team. When possible, have your team create the vision, mission, and purpose together. This creates even more buy-in. Be contagious with optimism and positivity.
- Be consistent. Be the same leader whether you are winning or losing. Stick to your principles and philosophy through adversity and challenges.
- Communicate. Communicate frequently with the team collectively and individually. Remember that where there is a void in communication, negativity will fill it.
- Connect. Understand that creating a connected team is one of the most important things you can do. Team beats talent when talent isn’t a team.
- Commit. Your team has to know that you are committed to them before they will commit to you. Lead in such a way that people feel your commitment.
- Care. Value each team member as a person, not a number.