Why do winning teams win? What does it take to build a winning culture? or even a championship-winning culture? I’ve spent the last many years researching and working with ideas, theories, and techniques from sports coaches, business coaches, psychologists, and others. Then blending them together into a general system and applying it to the field that I’m in, which is technology. Also youth soccer, because I spent 13 years coaching my two sons’ soccer teams, and I can tell you it’s all very similar.

If you do some quick research you’ll immediately find reference and evidence that points to psychological safety as the single largest factor in predicting team performance. In my experience this is absolutely true. The work, the hard part, is to set up the conditions that create that environment. Then just watch what happens. In software development it’s when a team continually comes up with innovative ideas, some small, some large, and some absolutely game changing, that no one expected or planned. I call that ‘the magic’. In sports it is when your team shows up to a game with a stronger or more favoured opponent, and yet wins (or comes close) because your team carries the energy, positivity, and belief it needs to perform beyond expectations. In both cases, your teams will have way more fun.

Here is an recent example that I think really captures it –
https://lnkd.in/gZC7Gx7c