3 Foundations to Build a World Class Team

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As I’ve said previously in this newsletter, I love thinking about building great teams as similar to building word class sports franchises. The other week I wrote about the idea of leaders being clear with themselves whether they are primarily playing the role of General Manager or Coach. In reality, great leaders do both depending on what the situation calls for, but the level you serve at within the organization dictates what percent of your time you spend as a General Manager vs. a Coach.

For example, a front line leader should likely spend 80%+ of their time as a coach and 20% as a GM while their boss may be closer to a 50/50 allocation. Many of you wrote me saying that the GM idea resonated as you looked for ways to scale existing teams or get promoted in your leadership career. You asked for more details about how to, “build great teams” beyond just the idea of being a GM on its surface.

This newsletter is titled “Simple, Not Easy” because it is one of my favorite mantras in life. While building world class teams is anything but easy, the following three pillars are the ones I use as a framework to try and keep the process simple. Each is inspired by my own observation of great leaders and modeled after some of the world’s great sports franchises.

The three pillars I use to build great teams are focusing on:

1. The Players

2. The Coaches

3. The System

While each pillar deserves a post unto itself, today’s discussion will serve as a primer for the ways in which you can use this framework to build a great team yourself.

The Players

Successful teams are always comprised of world class players, period. At best a world class system with mediocre players can only produce slightly above average results.

While I’ve been a Billy Beane devotee since I first read Moneyball nearly 20 years ago the Oakland A’s under his management never won a World Series and were never going to. Beane is famous for putting mediocre players in a world class system. There’s no doubt that he was able to drive above average results with those players, but they were never going to be world class or win a championship.

Recruiting, hiring, training, retaining, and performance management of world class talent should always be the single biggest priority of any leader. It bears repeating, leaders focus on building teams of world class players through:

1. Recruiting

2. Hiring

3. Training

4. Retaining

5. Performance Management

Assuming you are working at a company that has product market fit in a reasonably large market, the above five activities will get you 70% of the way to building a world class team. See Shane Parrish’s quote from the other week, “More often than not, the person is the problem, not the incentive system. No incentive system turns mediocre into extraordinary.”

The players on your team (aka the individual contributors) are the heroes of your organization. That is where the work gets done. Focus your team building activities accordingly.

The Coaches

While Coaches in certain sports (football) are more important than coaches in others (baseball), within the corporate landscape your coaches are vital to your team’s overall success. When I say coaches in this context, I’m referring to the front line leaders who help your players be successful and drive value every single day.

Coaches drive value through three main areas within your team:

1. Culture

2. Training

3. Accountability

Leaders ignore building a strong culture to their detriment. As a leader you have to be focused on building a strong culture centered around a unique identity with a clear mission and values as it acts as the unifying force by which your team shows up to do their job each day motivated and engaged to do so. Without that engagement you’ve created a team of robots who will never be world class.

Your coaches serve as the stewards of your culture throughout your team.

With respect to training, you could substitute coaching. At its core, the ability of your coaches to train your team and develop the world class talent you’ve hired is the difference between stagnation and continuous improvement. You must invest in your coaches ability to consistently become better coaches through a curriculum of their own development. This is when you, as a GM, become a coach again yourself.

World class teams are always those with high agency who take ownership of their actions and outcomes. Your coaches are the individuals responsible for that accountability which allows you to execute consistently. Firm, but fair is the name of the game when it comes to accountability. There is no person easier to fool than ourselves, your coaches are the ones who step in to ensure each individual player has a clear eyed, rational assessment of their own performance.

The System

Having spent much of my career in Operations roles I love a well designed system. Using our sports franchise model, think of the system as those individuals within the organization that ensure your players have what they need in order to be successful when they hit the field.

In the military a popular rejoinder to the Strategy vs. Tactics debate is, “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” While this is a gross oversimplification of a highly complicated question, it is true that the army who shows up well fed, well rested, with an uninterrupted supply of the right equipment will often take the day. Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander in WWII not because of his battlefield prowess, but due to his logistical expertise.

In the same vein of professionals focusing on logistics, effective leaders build world class systems for their teams to be successful. Generally, I recommend organizing your “system” for success around the following elements:

• Analytics

• Enablement

• Operations

Having a strong analytics team to support you as a leader is a force multiplier in determining where to apply your team’s efforts next. While data alone cannot lead to good judgement it is one of the most important factors for assessing truth (or at least approximating it) as you look to make decisions as a leader about where to apply your team’s limited resources.

From an enablement perspective, having partners who can help you coach and train both your players and your coaches is incredibly important. While self-directed learning is excellent, as you look to scale the success of your team you need a curriculum focused on those specific areas where, if improved, your team will see the highest impact. Your enablement partners are those who help you identify, build, and implement that curriculum.

Operations takes many different shapes and forms from one organization to the next. For me, effective operations teams help leaders do three things:

1. Identify opportunities within the business to drive impact

2. Ensure the “trains run on time” (e.g. your team has what they need to be successful when they take the field)

3. Coordinate effectively between your team and other teams throughout the organization

Just as professionals focus on logistics, so should you as a team builder focus on building a system that allows your team to focus on the game on the field in order to drive the greatest impact.

Conclusion

As you look to build a world class team take inspiration from sports franchises and focus on:

1. The Players

2. The Coaches

3. The System

If you consistently make investments in each of these areas in a focused, disciplined way your team will continue to improve. See y’all next week.