4 stages of building a winning team!

Winning mostly is a term used in sports. It refers to a team or an individual being superior to another team or an individual. However, in business or any corporate world, winning doesn’t mean someone has to lose. The key to any business success or any sports is Leadership and the key to leadership setting the standard & morale of our organization high.

Nothing hurts when we're winning, everything hurts when we're losing.

A survey has found that 90 % of the startup company aren’t there anymore within 5 years, and the main cause is poor leadership. Either company can’t get any wins under its belt or has fallen down and can’t t gets back to the winning ways. However, there have been plenty of examples that with strong leadership, the team which is losing, has very low morale, can get into the winning track very soon, and can maintain high morale.

I will be talking about 4 ways to get any company, sports team, or any organization from a low morale place to a winning high morale place. Most of the thing I will share is from my personal experience while running my company, a few things I have learned from some amazing books, and I have analyzed a sports team FC Barcelona which looked like a team with very low morale team not so long ago, and how a proper leadership of its manager has got them into the high morale and winning team that people know off.

Do everything

A leader needs to do everything if the team isn’t on the right track. There’s nothing unpleasant than being on a team that people don’t want to be on. When Spanish football legend Xavi Hernandez was appointed as the head coach of FC Barcelona back on Nov 6, 2021, nothing seemed right. Possibly the greatest football player of all time, Leo Messi was forced to leave due to the financial crisis of the club & the club had been in one of the worst shapes of its history. They were in very low morale and were losing more matches than winning. All the players had lost hope, some of them didn’t want to continue at the club. With the certain arrival of Xavi, he did a couple of things at the beginning. He started by addressing what was going wrong. There were a lot of disciplinary issues with the players, regarding their training and proper diet. He put some rules/actions in place, not that it will get them back to winning instantly, but will not give players any excuses to have low morale. Since the problem has been addressed, he started initiating belief in his players. A team will only move forward if they believe in themselves, and a leader's duty is to make his team believe in themselves. Once that is done, he started communicating hope. In the initial stage, a leader can’t expect others to get the ball rolling.

Be Productive

To create positive momentum, the leader needs to pick up some speed. What you do speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you see. As a leader, the best way to teach anything is by modeling, by being an example, and by showing our team how it is done. Being productive doesn’t mean doing everything, but it means using our time wisely. Having a very good relationship with our team is so crucial at this stage. Many businesses can be seen having staff dinners, and staff parties here and there, the sole reason to make the relationship within the organization strong and to make it a united team. Xavi soon after got appointed as a coach and implemented a rule that all the players and staff will have an afternoon meal together, the whole reason to build a strong bonding within the team. And these times are often considered the most crucial time to communicate your vision as a leader and set small goals along the way. Being productive also means working with 20% of top performers who can bring 80% results. At this stage, a team is moving forward slowly but the morale still needs to be high.

Have a strong destination.

I remember when I didn’t have a driving license, I would just ask anybody with a full license if I could be with them and drive. I enjoyed sitting in the driving seat and imagined what it would be like to have an eligible driving license and drive every single day. Later on, when I got my license going driving here & there wasn’t a fun thing for me, but it was fun only when I had a destination that I wanted to go to. The same is true while running a company, or an organization. As a leader, our goal is to set a destination, have our team buy into that destination, and what role each individual can play to reach that destination. Getting people to buy into any vision & ask for a commitment if they can play a part in that. Xavi has done the same. He set a destination that the team would be back to winning ways, to playing the beautiful game, but needs a commitment from the players. After were have a destination, have passed that vision, and after the commitment is made, the focus of a leader has to be on equipping his team. A primary job of a leader has to be people development. A team can only win if all the players are winning. Xavi equipped players such as Ousmane Dembele, Gerald Pique, Jordi Alba, and more, and help them reach their potential. These players understood the vision, gave their commitment, and became the best version of themselves to help the team succeed. The whole team has high morale, is united, and believes that they can pass through anything they come at. They get some big wins under their belt which can further take their morale to a higher level.

Have a consistent focus.

The hard work that Xavi had done was starting to be visible to everybody. The team was on high morale when they faced their arch-rival league leader Real Madrid on the 21st of March. Xavi's team wasn’t the more talented team, nor the most experienced team among the two, but the high morale, the vision they had caught, and the commitment they had given made all the difference. They were able to score four past the Madrid goal post. When an organization has achieved a good amount of success, the key to maintaining & growth is to have a consistent focus. My business coaches used to tell me, that the day you feel like you've arrived is the day you start falling down. It is very important as a leader not to let that win go into our head, and continue on the high morale for bigger goals to achieve.