Building a team is hard; building a winning team is even harder. For every organization that manages to achieve the right mix of talent, culture, and performance expectations, many more find themselves lacking in one area or another. Consider the following cautionary tales. One team of “superstars” in a large technology organization failed to gel simply because they could not agree on working norms. Another high-performing group underachieved because the executive team and line managers had very different views of their roles: Executives were frustrated by line managers’ hesitancy to make and own critical decisions, while the line managers were afraid to be labeled as failures by these same executives if their moves deviated too far from the status quo. Both sides pointed fingers at each other when outcomes failed to meet expectations.

What does it take to avoid these traps? What differentiates the teams that are operating at the pinnacle in their fields from those that are lagging behind? What skills, mindsets, and behaviors do high-performing teams have that others don’t? How do these high-performing teams stay in sync? And how do they sustain their collective focus over time, even when the work is hard?

We set out to answer these and other questions by turning to what some business leaders might consider an unconventional source: more than 25 of the most ambitious and successful administrators, coaches, and players at athletic programs across the United States, both at the professional and Division I college levels (see sidebar, “Conversations with coaches and others”).

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Despite those challenges, however, many of the sports leaders we spoke with seem to have found a winning formula for building and, when needed, reinventing their teams. Four themes emerge from our interviews that underscore how these leaders significantly changed the trajectory of their programs:

• Set a standard for the program that clearly establishes the team’s objectives. These leaders strongly emphasize creating a culture that everyone buys into, where each teammate “walks the talk” each day, even when no one is watching.
• Build a team with a diverse set of leadership skills and functional capabilities. These sports leaders are not simply looking for the best players, but the right players who will help them win.
• Create a playbook for optimizing team performance. These leaders clearly and purposefully codify how the work gets done and emphasize consistency in operations—from day-to-day routines (in the weight room and on the playing field) all the way to annual planning cycles.
• Establish an edge and the confidence that sets the team apart. These leaders explore every possible angle to elevate the confidence and skills of everyone in the program—from the athletes and the coaching staff to the strength and conditioning team to the nutritionists to the groundskeepers. As Brian Wright, the general manager (GM) of the San Antonio Spurs, tells us, “Everyone on the team has a critical role to play in ensuring the success of the group. We win by engaging everyone, not just our star players.”

In this article, we explore these four themes and suggest ways that corporate leaders can incorporate best practices in team building from the world of sports into their own organizations. The comparisons across domains aren’t perfect, and context certainly matters: Some of these themes may end up being more or less resonant for a football team, a rowing team, a golf team, or a financial-planning or software development team.¹ But there are enough strong similarities to suggest that these four principles can help leaders in Fortune 500 organizations build successful teams, turn around low performers, and ultimately create more value for their companies over the long term.

Set a new standard for the program

A big challenge for businesses seeking to build new teams or reinvent existing ones is getting everyone moving in the same direction and pursuing the same overarching objectives. Organizations often fall short in this area because the shared mission isn’t well developed, consistently communicated, or effectively incorporated into daily routines. As a result, teams don’t know what they don’t know, and they remain unclear about how their respective contributions further the team’s goals.

In the world of sports, the outcomes are more finite than they are in business—either you win or you lose. Yet for most of the sports leaders we spoke with, clarifying their teams’ objectives and setting a new standard and culture for their programs—whether that meant reiterating existing mindsets or behaviors or replacing them with entirely new ones—was the very first step toward realizing success. “Each day here looks and feels the same in terms of expectations, communication, and resources,” explains the Spurs’ Wright. “Outcomes take care of themselves when the standard is in place.”

Upon taking the job, the sports leaders we spoke with engaged in deep-listening exercises as they examined recent performance, quantified their organizations’ full potential, and assessed the overall health of the programs they were taking over. They scheduled focus groups and office tours and used the data collected from these events to chart a path forward for their programs.

This was the approach taken by Dan Bartholomae, vice president and athletic director at Western Michigan University, a Division I program: “I set out to create a plan for athletics, and I engaged a lot of external stakeholders to get it right. We redefined what ‘The Western Way’ would be moving forward.”

At the time he was hired, in 2022, the performance of the university’s sports teams was trending downward, falling from an average fifth-place finish in the Mid-American Conference (MAC) between 2014 and 2017 to an average ninth-place finish when he arrived on campus. There were some successes—an occasional bowl game or appearance in end-of-season tournaments—but there was no overarching “theory of winning” across Western Michigan’s sports teams.

Bartholomae wanted to establish a new standard for the athletic program, where it was no longer simply a collection of independent sports teams but a fully integrated program that could energize student athletes, the campus, and the broader Kalamazoo community. At first, there was some skepticism. “I had people leave the program within my first six months, because they didn’t believe,” says Bartholomae. “I also had people I didn’t think would make it who are now some of our highest performers.”

Among his initial actions, Bartholomae sought out existing leadership and attended operating meetings on campus to gather input from a range of important internal and external stakeholders and to educate them about what it would take to run a distinctive and fully integrated Division I athletic program. Through this outreach, Bartholomae was able to change the tone of conversations, break down barriers across teams, and foster more collaboration within the program.

He prioritized creating more access across teams, within levels of the organization, and even to himself. Bartholomae’s office door was always open. He and several of the other leaders we spoke with emphasize the importance of humility in team building—“solving for we, rather than me”—as well as the willingness to challenge everything.

The efforts to create a new standard have paid off: Western Michigan’s athletic program has risen from an average ranking of ninth in MAC conference play to fourth over the past three years. The university’s hockey team reached the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA’s) Frozen Four for the first time in the program’s history and won the national championship in the spring of 2025. In fact, all five fall sports teams at Western Michigan reached the NCAA postseason, an unprecedented accomplishment in the conference.