From the basketball court to the workplace: Winning with Team Culture!

Why do certain teams produce so much more than others? Whenever I’ve heard about super-cultures like in Google, Zappos, Pixar, Facebook, Apple, Airbnb or Netflix (and in many more companies),I wonder what all of these have in common and what makes their teams perform so much better? I did my research, read several books and talked with a few people. And now I have found answers which I would like to share with you in this post. But before I share why team culture is crucial, what makes some teams achieve great results and how you know if your team/culture is right, let me tell you one of my stories.

I’ve played all kinds of sports since I was 3 years old, but almost the whole my life I’ve actively dedicated myself particularly to basketball. Sports and playing basketball have taught me many things such as:

• Resilience: I’ve been winning and losing my entire life, and I have learned how to get up and keep going. I’ve learned how to eliminate external influences to win the game, how to be a good follower as well as how to take control of a situation and find the way to win. When I struggle, I dedicate extra time to practice until I improve.
• Decision-making: A player reacts one way one time, then another way the next time based on the movements of defense and offense. It’s easy not to make the correct decision, and it’s easy as well for the coach to miss the mistake because so many things are going on at the same time.
• Teamwork: You always work with others towards a common goal as a team. You understand that the team needs to always trump individual needs, so you learn to be selfless. Being part of a team means a serious commitment to the group. Personal sacrifices come with the territory whether it’s giving up weekends for games, days for practice, maintaining a training diet, playing less during the game or putting your ego aside.
• Time management: From a young age I’ve had to learn to handle a number of priorities: school, sports, and social activities. It’s sometimes tough to balance rigorous practice schedules, classes, homework, tournaments, and travel.
• Accountability: You always have to understand your role, and know where you fit in with the team to win. When a play breaks down and I own it, I would look my teammates and coaches in the eye and say, “my bad”. You know how to take responsibility for your own mistakes and commit to better performance in the future.
• Improving: You have to constantly strive to improve. I would spend nights watching games, youtube videos with training tutorials, studying plays or be on the outside playground to do extra training on my own. You have to constantly seek ways to learn more about your role, physical condition, teammates, opponents and training techniques to raise your value within the team.
• Feedback: I’ve learned how to receive and provide feedback for the betterment of the team, and how to thrive on clear expectations. Everybody has to handle criticism and not blame each other — everybody has to be coachable. I’m so used to direct and often blunt feedback. Thanks to that I can handle private and public criticism, and do not let it impact my attitude. You should not overthink criticism or get defensive. Instead, you should take constructive feedback and apply it immediately. On the other side, it teaches me to respond well to praise and using it to motivate further improvements.

What usually happens during the game? In short: You see 1–2 coach/es, 5 people on the court, and around 5 sitting on the bench waiting for their chance. All decisions are ‘action-reaction’ while 5 people on the court running/jumping their asses off, ‘left-right’ over and over and constantly pressured by other 5 players, breathing down everywhere on your neck. Every second, every move is your decision, and with every decision you see the consequences. The opponent could score thanks to your mistake and your teammates would get pissed or you would be switched for another player and out from the game (“fired”).

How long you play in the game depends on:

• How much you practiced
• How good your performance is
• How good your physical condition is
• How well you can contribute to your team winning

In my opinion a basketball court is like a workplace: high-performance and fast-paced, don’t you think?

This season 2017/2018, I joined a new dutch basketball club, called BVA-Dames 3. We would have 10 teams in our competition pool, play around 18 games within 7 months and our team was kind of predicted to lose given:

• the players’ abilities (girls who have never played basketball alongside girls who have played their whole life like me. Different ages, conditions and different heights — me being 162 cm, you can guess we were not the tallest team)
• the players’ background (girls from different sports backgrounds- tennis, soccer, or even no sports before. Different basketball clubs and different countries. Different personalities, different marital status, sexualities, with/without kids, working/students/unemployed)
• coaches’ experiences (experienced/less experienced with coaching, experienced/less experienced with coaching women specifically)

Nobody would expect us to win. They ranked us low: “Have fun girls, don’t take it too seriously”

We won the championship!

How did we win?

• Connection and trust
• Strong leadership
• Constructive feedback and NO status management
• Elimination of “bad apples”
• Shared commitments, values, and goal

We bonded and connected with each other really early on (“there was usually a lot of talks, food & drinks involved”). You have to trust your team, risk your time and take the lead on your own but you know they have your back, so if you fail, they would do their best to fix it for you.

We had to LEARN be selfless as much as possible. We weren’t at the beginning and we lost 2 games, but quickly our coaches would strictly train us (sometimes with yelling, punishments and sometimes with jokes and rewards) to be selfless: “pass, move, pass, cut, help, switch, pass, shoot, jump, watch-out, take it …”- that was our communication during games and practice: short words, nothing more.

No status management: on the court we all are equal. No status management, everybody has to give everything: extra passes, alerting defense, tireless hustle. We would do two things over and over: we’d tell each other the truth with no bullshit, and then we would still like each other, support each other, and cover each other’s backs. No blaming, no privileges, nobody is right just because they are more senior than any other. No ego fights!

Before the season had started, we had a team meeting- there we were sitting in the circle, sipping booze and promising each other’s commitment! We all agreed that the team is more important than an individual: we promised each other that we would act for the team and not for the individual. We didn’t want to lose, we all are pretty competitive, we wanted to win at least as many games as was possible and we talked about sacrifices necessary to win (and of course have fun meanwhile).

The girls who were not willing to work hard during practices, who were selfish or who were causing drama or problems within the team had to leave or didn’t play during games.

Now we have summer break and I am counting the days until I can start training with my team again for the new season, and I’m wondering how far we can go this time as we are now one league up.

That’s my story! Why I’m telling you this story is because it’s my own personal example of how a great team culture can work and drive performance. It works!

So… Why is a team culture important for you?

Nowadays everybody is talking about millenials and you might think it’s overreacted topic. Unfortunately the opposite is a true. When you look at the numbers from a generational perspective of how many workers are in the marketplace, you will see that there are:

1. Baby boomers (many)
2. Millennials (many)
3. Gen Xers (much fewer)

Soon, the baby boomers are going to retire, so then we see a workforce full of millenials. Their preferences for work will dominate and it will be crucial for companies to follow them especially in the next 10 years.

Smart companies have already started paying attention to this fact. Spending their time and resources to understand better this generation. What will they want? How we can match their preferences and create a workplace so we can keep them.

Look at the following dots:

• that marriage and being a parent are mostly not on their priority list, actually they cannot afford it either.
• this generation is described as the loneliest one (feeling lonely, mofo, anxious, burn-out, lost)
• first four of their highest preferences for work are:

• They are also striving for mentorship, guidance and change for talent development.

What do you see when you are looking at these dots?

Let me explain to you what I see when I connect the dots.

From my perspective it means that the place where they work, the company which they work for and the people they work with are their family. Managers and leaders are their parents, colleagues are their brothers and sisters and the office is their home. Family is a metaphor for culture in this case. Not coincidentally, many successful groups have adopted the use of family-esque identifiers. People who work at Pixarians, Googlers, Zapponians, KIPPsters, Payconians and others feel this idea. And if they don’t feel the family, they leave. They are so many choices out there.

Of course, you cannot think that they will stay with you for 15 years, as kids eventually fly from the nest, but you can keep them as long as possible, maybe just 1–3 years more is already a great deal for the companies and big competitive advantage. There’s nothing more expensive to a business than people problems and dysfunctional teams. As Vanderbloem said “In the tech industry, turnover is rampant. This particular tech sector’s churn rate is about 38%. Once the company started spending money on culture, their churn rate dropped to 2%. So, every year, four people leave instead of 76. That’s 72 vacancies they don’t have to deal with every year. By spending a million dollars on culture, they’ve retained people. They have momentum in their business, less turnover cost, less hiring cost and greater profitability.” That’s why he called his book ‘Culture Wins,’” because “It’s a way to win in the coming years”.

Gallup’s Global Workplace Report describes engaged employees as people who work with passion and are connected with their company. They drive innovation and move the company forward. Not-engaged employees are essentially ‘checked out’. They’re sleepwalking through the day, putting in time but not passion to their work. Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish.

Culture isn’t just about making sure everybody’s happy. It actually links to productivity and performance. A good team culture allows individuals to grow and express their talents to their fullest ability. A strong culture increases net income 756 percent over eleven years, according to a Harvard study of more than two hundred companies.