Successful sports teams win by focusing on daily improvement rather than the championship itself. Companies that obsess over end goals miss the foundation: putting people in environments where they get better every day.
But it also starts with a bit of a mindset shift. If you look at— and this is, I think, a great lesson from sports— if you look at great teams, right, teams that year in and year out, if they're not winning the championship, they're always part of the conversation. They're the kinds of organizations that are truly winning organizations. When you crawl inside how they really work together and work with one another, for them, the goal is not winning the championship. The goal is how do we get better every single day? Because we know if we do that, we're always going to be in that position to win that championship. So the focus really changes. And I think for a lot of companies today, when the focus is always so squarely on the goal and not necessarily on putting people in a position where they're continually and continuously improving themselves so that they're in a better position, in better shape to achieve that goal, I think that's number one.
