Are you a Gold Medal Coach and are you creating Gold Medal Teams?

While some sports are slowly starting back up, as are businesses, we might have missed that the Olympics were scheduled to start last week. Hopefully, we will see the Olympics next year, or perhaps it will be in four years, but it got me thinking again about what champions and coaches do to assemble and inspire Gold Medal teams and the lessons I continue to take into my life in business.

The Olympics are always exciting to watch, and I particularly like the team sports of baseball, basketball, and soccer given the dynamics of competitors coming together for their country. These teams, each representing their home country, pull together the best of the best from their sport, even if, weeks before, they were going head to head against each other. It’s not often we get to see a Gold Medal team come together with that level of top talent that would have otherwise been bitter rivals in the Premier League, the NBA, you name it. Think about what it takes to coach a team of stars - and rivals - like that! It’s more similar than you would otherwise think to the way that talent recruitment functions in tech companies, where, often, we are looking to bring in the best and the brightest, often from companies with competing visions and go to market. When you do talent recruitment and development right, you can build your own All-Star or Gold Medal team and enable building firms with a Growth Mindset and Learning Culture, a topic I wrote about earlier this year.  

That right culture is also necessary in how one makes a Gold Medal team. There needs to be inspiring goals, i.e. a Growth Mindset, but to truly achieve a Gold Medal, there also must be a Learning Culture: each member of your “Olympic” team learns how best to work together to create momentum towards a defined objective of winning. To be more successful than our peers, we need to have a strategy, execute on it better than the competition, and critically, we need to have and cultivate great talent. It is great talent, and well managed talent, that accelerates our ability to learn at a pace greater than our competition and create the momentum from which notable success and results are achieved. We need to be creating and coaching our Gold Medal teams.

Here at IFS, we have worked to mobilize internal talent and recruit heavily from competitors. I can’t say despite our favorable leadership gap in this year’s Gartner’s FSM Magic Quadrant and significant growth that we’ve built a dynasty – yet. It is a work in progress and recruiting great players both on the field and in tech is most certainly one step of the puzzle. The most important piece in any success story, and what brings the puzzle together is creating the team, having the shared goal, a space where each player contributes collectively, but also has the chance to shine. That is what it takes to create these “Gold Medal” teams. And ultimately, it is the quality of the relationships that has a paramount impact on how talent performs on an Olympic team or in a software company.

One can’t be a Gold Medal coach if you don’t care about your people and put their satisfaction, motivation and performance at the heart of what you do. One also must practice performance. There is the adage that practice makes perfect, but in “game-time” situations, you need talent with the training and skills to improvise if needed as what you practice in a drill is never exactly the same as the real-life situation. We need to be practicing performance with its variables and preparing talent to have the confidence to perform on a larger stage, including one like the Olympics. For your company, maybe it’ll be the biggest deal you’ve ever signed, maybe an Initial Public Offering, or some other transformative event.

Mike Krzyzewski is still the only coach I know of that led a team to three consecutive Olympic gold medals, as well as Gold at the FIBA World Cup and NCAA Championships in his own right as a college coach at Duke. He inspired greatness because he had the respect of the most talented players and put the talent front and center regardless of which position and role each player had. He knew how to cultivate the best in both offense and defense to win games and Gold Medals.

 As advice to any leader, and any CEO or line manager, earning the respect of your team, your peers and your colleagues is key. That respect is not a right of a manager because of your title, it is earned, and you need to earn it again and again, every day. Sometimes as leaders and managers, we also forget that we are coaches too and must be cultivating the growth of our talent in each interaction and making sure we don’t sacrifice either their respect in us, or a critical component I will speak to next - trust.

The second essential element that creates Gold Medal teams out of rivals is: Trust. Talent works much harder for love and respect than they do from fear or avoidance of discipline. Money is of course important also, but money can buy loyalty only to a point. To create a team that cares, one that is committed and inspired, you need to buoy or build that from the ground up with trust and respect. Speaking of basketball, yes, Lebron James is amazing in any capacity, but as coaches, we want Lebron at top form, not just biding time making his paycheck, in order to win a Gold Medal. Teams come first, supporting each member as an individual, and the leader / manager / coach must embody that as well. Superstars are an incredible asset as long as they’re working towards a team effort, not behaving as a collection of egos and individuals trying to play zero sum games.

In the excellent book written by Steven Covey called the Speed of Trust, the characteristics of high trust teams are laid out:

-         Common purpose and values (which typically means fewer discipline problems)

-         Respect (already mentioned above)

-         Commitment

-         Resiliency

-         Love which decreases fear

-         Motivation

-         Culture of celebrating success whether one’s own, a peer’s or the team’s

By contrast, low trust teams, companies and relationships are often painful to see and be around. They typically include:

-         Lack of a shared vision

-         Lack of respect

-         Varying levels of commitment

-         Lots of finger pointing and pursuit of individual over team goals

-         A lack of love, which creates fear

This concept of playing together versus playing apart, cultivating teamwork, respect and trust, is what builds a true team of All-Stars, whether it’s going out to win a Gold Medal, or creating a software company that defines or re-defines an industry and outperforms its peers.

The qualities of an Olympic coach are therefore the same attributes that are becoming increasingly prized in a CEO. Yes, there are certainly different archetypes of an Olympic gold medal coach or CEO in personality, and yes, companies need to be make money for their shareholders and coaches win games or matches, but when you strip personality and acumen to its basics, there are some key traits that are significant to success. Based on my experience, here are the ten traits that define truly All-Star leadership.

An All-Star leader will be:

1.      Positive

2.      Enthusiastic

3.      Supportive

4.      Trusting

5.      Focused

6.      Knowledgeable

7.      Observant

8.      Respectful

9.      Patient

10.  A Clear Communicator

Talent wants to work with winners and where they shine and also grow from the experience. Frankly, the greatest orchestra conductors also let the talent and their music shine, the same way the best coaches do.  But for all that we may speak to traits that are generally found in the highest performing culture, each genius coach is also unique and has dared to be different in their pursuit of excellence.

For my European friends and those of us passionate about soccer/European football, Alex Ferguson is a legend. While he didn’t win an Olympic gold medal (and in fact cultivated some drama over the Olympics), over his 27 years with Manchester United, he won 13 league championships and two Championship League titles re-defining along the way what a top Premier League coach is.

At its heart, Alex Ferguson was so successful because he was masterful at cultivating talent in an evolving sport getting the best out of veterans and coaxing genius out of youngsters. If there was a criticism, it is that he was gruff (we are all trying to improve in one way or another), but he modeled adaptability, the ability to recruit and manage talent, calm under pressure, a no nonsense attitude, keen awareness of tactics, the ability to delegate, and the ability to manage all the stakeholders that would otherwise get in the way of strategy becoming results. No wonder he has been so successful!

We have spoken of key traits, looked at the world’s best coaches, and the through-line is their ability to lead to achieve results, maximize the resources they are given, and inspire greatness. Phenomenal coaches have an extraordinary ability to solve problems and to achieve the art of the possible to make breakthroughs and inspire change.

Last but not least, inspirational coaches all have a winner’s mentality. Yes, even the greatest coaches didn’t always win, but they always believed they could win, and they cultivated that belief in their talent. Having goals with the will, energy, creativity, courage, faith and determination to achieve lead to the metaphysical attributes that great coaches inspire in their teams and effectuate through vision, strategy and behaviors. 

We all want to be winners in what we do as leaders, motivators, and influencers. Who are the legends in coaching that inspire you to greatness and winning a Gold Medal? And are you working right now to bring in this advice and lessons from others who inspire you to create your own Gold Medal team? 

We may not be able to have an Olympics this year, but we can all work harder and use this time ourselves to become Olympic-grade coaches and leaders.