The other day at a team lunch a question was posed: if you could go back and relive any one year of your life without changing anything, which year would you choose? I knew my answer immediately: any year that encompassed a soccer season at Wheaton College. Primarily because, for me, college was an amazingly impactful experience on the whole. But more specifically because, until this year, I have never been on a team of its equal.

Ability + Attitude
Over the years I've given a lot of thought to what made that particular team so exemplary and how its components could possibly be replicated in a work environment. There is no denying that we had talent. Of the six women in my class, three of them were All-Americans and one was a Rhodes Scholar (spoiler alert: I was neither). But even among the less lauded on the roster, we had solid players in positions all over the field. It was through a combination of coaching and consistent work to build consensus that we were able to transcend the skills and strengths of individual players. We created an environment that fostered healthy competition, camaraderie, relentless drive, sacrifice for the good of the group, uniting to overcome great odds, and a collective desire to reach an outsized, uncommon goal. Our abilities brought us together, but our commitment to a collective attitude made us successful.

Be A Player Coach
Experts have long been trying to translate sports team learnings to professional team successes. There are literally thousands of business books out there on how to build a better team. So why is it that healthy, productive, successful professional teams seem to be so elusive? If a group of 18-22 year olds can be coached into building a team void of the five dysfunctions on a soccer pitch, why can’t more organizations crack the code in the workplace?
The captain of a sports team (especially those chosen by their peers) is not necessarily the best player on the roster. Lesser skilled players (i.e. yours truly) are often selected for this role because of their experience, perspective, rapport with other players, or for modeling the right mindset. People like this are ideally suited to model vulnerability, promote accountability, and create buy-in with the rest of the team precisely because they cannot rely on their talent to carry the day.
On the other hand, teams benefit from superstars. People of enviable talent that make difficult things look easy. These folks inspire the people around them with their performance and drive. They raise the level and expectations for everyone else.
Whether the people in your organization consider their leader(s) to be a superstar talent or a mindset maven is mostly irrelevant. What matters is whether they trust that leaders have clearly articulated the team’s goals and are focused on getting results. The critical task for leaders is coaching all different types of folks on the team into a collective mindset to accept both the challenge of meeting those goals and the accountability of obtaining the results.
Modify a Model that Works for Your Team
At the start of 2024, three new additions had taken our full-time employee count from four to seven, almost overnight. With the addition of big new talents and skillsets, we needed to find a way to foster an environment that elevated our team above our individual strengths. How could we make the lessons of a sports team resonate with a group of people who mostly hadn’t grown up playing team sports? We found our answer in a 30-year-old HBR model which we modified to meet our needs.

The basic premise of the service profit chain is that happy employees provide better service to customers, increasing the likelihood that they will become loyal customers, leading to more profit for the company. We changed our model slightly to help our team understand that we have to take care of one another in order to take better care of our clients.
In a service business like ours, it’s easy for leaders to prioritize client needs above all else. We’ve all worked in agency environments where pressure builds as a result of poor communication, unclear goals and expectations, and absence of trust. For us, being transparent about our adapted service-profit chain model has made clear to each team member the expectation that we have a duty to each other equally as important as our duty to our clients. If we don’t prioritize our internal alignment, our ability to service our clients will eventually suffer, prohibiting our long-term growth and success.
The Hard is What Makes It Great
The last thing I want to do is undersell the challenges of building a successful team. After all, I’ve been on only two truly great teams in my life, and neither of them came together easily. But in both sports and life, great challenges make for great victories. Once a team has committed to each other, our outsized, uncommon goals not only become more attainable, but reaching them together becomes a whole lot of fun.

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