What if the reason your team isn’t winning has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with how you see talent? In sports, breakthroughs rarely come from signing another superstar. They come from looking through a new lens: a coach who reimagines the system around a player’s strengths, a strategist who reframes “what good looks like,” and a culture that treats recovery as seriously as effort.
That idea was at the center of a recent LinkedIn Live webinar moderated by my MIT Sloan Executive Education colleague and Senior Director, Rob Dietel, and featuring Ben Shields and Shira Springer, both Senior Lecturers in Managerial Communication.
See more: Watch the Building a Winning Team: Leadership Lessons from Sports webinar.
The harmony of four factors
Winning is never about one thing. As Ben explains, the most successful teams harmonize four interdependent elements:
- Talent: The right mix of skills and motivations, not just star power
- Management: Leadership that fits the team’s personality and purpose
- System: The strategies, structures, and habits that enable peak performance
- Culture: The shared values and behaviors that sustain it all
These factors must reinforce each other. When they clash—when a leadership style doesn’t fit the talent, or the system stifles creativity—performance flags. When they align, momentum builds naturally.
The NBA’s Indiana Pacers provide a vivid example. Head coach Rick Carlisle handed Tyrese Haliburton the “keys to the team,” tailoring the system to his playmaking speed and vision. The result wasn’t just a run to the finals; it was proof that adaptability beats orthodoxy. Leaders who adjust their playbooks to the people they have, rather than forcing people into old playbooks, unlock hidden capacity.
Process with a purpose
Elite teams in sport obsess over process, but not for bureaucracy’s sake. Outcomes are influenced by luck and context; process is controllable. The best coaches focus relentlessly on “process over outcome.” That doesn’t mean ignoring results. It means building repeatable patterns that predict them.
A powerful way to bring this to business is what Ben calls “seasonifying” the year: breaking long, amorphous timelines into shorter “seasons” with clear goals and scoreboards. In practice, that means:
- Defining a shared, stretch goal for a short cycle
- Identifying the single leading indicator that most predicts success
- Practicing and refining that behavior until it becomes culture
- Reviewing, celebrating, and resetting at the end of each season
These shorter cycles invite experimentation, normalize learning from failure, and make progress visible.
Acting on the data
Sports teams have become laboratories of data and analytics, but their real advantage lies in translation, turning numbers into insight at game speed. As Shira notes, every team now collects mountains of data; the differentiator is how effectively it’s communicated and applied.
There are three ways to win with data: collect better information than competitors; analyze better, extract the real signal; and, finally, apply better, which is to say, translate insight into behavior faster.
Most organizations stall at the last step. The lesson from sports: build “translation layers.” Empower data-minded coaches, operational analysts, and communicators who can turn metrics into meaning. Here, storytelling is essential. The best leaders use stories to humanize data, choosing a single stat that symbolizes the culture they want and repeating it until it becomes identity.
Designing for resilience
Every high-performing team eventually faces adversity. The ones that sustain success are those that design for resilience, not just performance. Sports science now treats performance as three-dimensional: physical, mental, and emotional. And businesses are beginning to follow suit, creating environments that value recovery, focus, and emotional health alongside productivity.
When team members feel supported as whole people, they not only endure challenges but also learn faster from them. That resilience is the foundation of sustainable winning.
Therefore, building a winning team isn’t about charisma or slogans; it’s about design and discipline. Align the four factors. Adapt your system to your people. Structure time so practice compounds. Employ data that drives action. Tell stories that make purpose tangible. And celebrate shared success.
Sharing the glory
In sports, the championship ring doesn’t just go to the players. The ticketing staff, data analysts, and PR professionals all share the reward. They helped build the conditions for winning. In organizations, we can mirror this spirit by creating visible rituals and artifacts that celebrate contribution across every function. Recognition—when it’s collective and meaningful—cements culture.
My takeaway
If you are looking for a place to start, try this: define a short “season,” pick one measurable behavior that predicts success, tell a story about why it matters, and mark the finish together. Do this consistently, and you’ll find yourself leading a team that knows not only how to win but how to keep winning!
If you’d like to gain a deeper understanding of the topic, join Ben and Shira December 3-5 in the MIT Sloan Executive Education live online course Data-Driven Teams: The Art and Science of Winning.