When our society talks about success, we tend to focus on individual success. We obsess about who is the “greatest of all time,” who is most responsible for a win, or what players or coaches a team might add next season to become even better.

What can get lost in this way of thinking is that leaders don’t accomplish anything by themselves. In fact, nothing of significance in life is achieved alone. To do great things, we rely on teammates. And to win, team leaders must find ways to draw the best physical, mental, and emotional performance from the players working with them.

Since retiring from football, Tom has been reflecting on what he brought to the teams he played on. Naturally, most people focus on his role as a quarterback. But we believe that another set of behaviors—how he helped the people around him perform better—was a vital part of why those teams won so much.

As part of Tom’s exploration of this topic, he reached out to Nitin, who has been studying and teaching leadership for nearly four decades. He’s also a football fan—a Patriots season ticket holder—who has followed Tom’s career closely. Together, we began to sort through Tom’s experiences to identify the leadership principles that people can use to maximize performance from their teammates.

In this article, we’ve distilled this work into a set of seven behaviors. We’ve written the rest of the piece in Tom’s voice because these ideas are based on his experiences, but what follows is a collaborative effort. Although Tom’s experiences took place mostly in sports, we believe that many of the techniques he used can be applied in any organization.

A Team-Focused Philosophy

Leadership comes down to two things: Do you care about your teammates and their role on the team? And do you care about winning, which is what you’re ultimately trying to do together? Leadership requires trust, and trust usually comes from deeply caring about one another and the belief that winning is about the team. You must feel passionate about both.

I’ve always tried to be an ideal teammate. Much of my approach came from being born into an amazing family and having a strong upbringing, and this orientation deepened when I was in high school and college. Playing football at the University of Michigan, we had a team-centric philosophy that became central to who I am today. There’s an old saying in sports: Do you want to be a star, or do you want to be a champion? At Michigan, I was focused on our team goals—on winning games and championships for our school, and on being a great teammate rather than achieving individual goals. That attitude stayed with me throughout my NFL career.

If you spent time in professional sports locker rooms, you might be surprised that players don’t always behave that way. Some players take all the credit when things go right, but when things go wrong, they make excuses and place the blame on everyone else, including referees, teammates, and coaches. They focus too much on individual statistics or records or awards. They are self-serving, and their teammates recognize it. When I see players like that, who seem to care more about themselves than the team, I can also see how that makes the people around them less motivated to give their best effort. In a way, I was lucky those behaviors are so pervasive, because if they weren’t, many of the teams I played against would have been more difficult to beat.

So what exactly do great team leaders do? I believe there are seven key things.

Put the team first, always, even when facing personal adversity.

That was one of the first lessons I learned about leadership. In college, I “red-shirted” as a freshman, and I didn’t get to play much during my second year. In my third year, I thought I had a good shot at being the starting quarterback, but I was beaten out (fair and square) by a great leader and quarterback named Brian Griese, who went on to play many successful years in the NFL. My job was to support and push Brian in practice to help him get better. Though I was disappointed, I wasn’t pissed off that he beat me, and I never tried to bring him down. That year, we went undefeated and won the national championship, and although I wasn’t on the field much, I was very happy with the role that I played.

In my fourth year, I started every game, and we finished with an electrifying victory in the Citrus Bowl against a great Arkansas team. In my fifth year, the team named me captain, and I thought I’d earned the right to again be the starting quarterback. But Michigan had recruited a top prospect named Drew Hensen. The coaches were adamant that he would play, and I began to doubt whether they wanted me to be the starter. Our coach decided that an alternating rotation, which rarely happens in football, was the way our team would go forward. We split time at quarterback for most of the year, even though at times I thought I outplayed Drew. But I refused to sulk or complain—which I had done my share of when I was younger—because I wanted to be focused on the team’s success.

In our third game of the year, against Syracuse, Drew threw a long touchdown pass to end the second quarter. At halftime the coaches chose Drew to play the entire second half while I watched from the sideline. It felt like a gut punch. We won the game, and Michigan has an awesome tradition: In the locker room after a win, the captains stand on chairs and lead the team in singing the fight song. I was crushed that I hadn’t played in the second half, but I stood up on that chair and I screamed those lyrics out as loud as I could. I’m sure people knew I was disappointed, but I wanted to show everyone that I supported Drew and the team. I felt like that really endeared me to my teammates. A few games later, the coach chose me to become the permanent quarterback. We won the rest of our games, including a dramatic overtime win in my last college game, in the Orange Bowl.

The way I handled myself during the first few games of that season, when things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, was very important in my development as a leader. I continued to work hard, I put the team first, and I always supported my teammates, even as I tried to prove that I was the right person to play quarterback. This fundamental change in attitude set the tone for the rest of my athletic career.