The Performance Advantage

Think about any great sporting team. The players are talented. They train hard. They have a game plan and a scoreboard that makes performance impossible to hide. But talent and strategy don’t fully explain why some teams consistently outperform others.

There is something else happening within the team. An expectation of how they perform together. How hard they work when nobody is watching. Whether they put the team ahead of themselves. How they respond when they are losing. We call that culture, and strangely, while we readily accept its importance in sport, many business owners still regard culture as something slightly soft, the territory of HR departments and values painted on walls.

Yet culture may be one of the most commercial things a business owner can work on. Every business already has one. It isn’t something you introduce once the business is big enough; it forms wherever people work together. The question is what kind has formed, and what effect it’s having on performance.

FC Barcelona under Pep Guardiola won 14 of a possible 19 trophies. But what made them remarkable wasn’t simply winning; it was that people everywhere could recognise how Barcelona played. There was a Barcelona way, a shared identity strong enough to guide hundreds of small decisions a day, without instruction.

I see the same principle closer to home. A family-owned retail group I work with already had everything you’d want on paper: real values, and the commercial disciplines and systems to match. What was missing wasn’t ability or process. Those disciplines simply hadn’t become part of who they were as a team. They existed in the business, but they weren’t yet instinctive in the way the team operated. The work has been threading commercial thinking into the culture itself, without losing the values that built the business. Sales are already outperforming the economic climate, and that’s before the shift has fully taken hold.

Daniel Coyle’s research into highly successful groups reaches a similar conclusion. Strong cultures create belonging, an environment where people can be open about problems, and a shared understanding of what they’re working towards. Culture is experienced, not announced by management. That distinction is important.

A business can have talented individuals and still be an ordinary team. Barcelona’s story is interesting precisely because the objective wasn’t to collect the world’s best players; it was to develop people capable of playing the Barcelona way. Talented people with a good game plan
can play well without the boss watching.

What’s your business way? What would it need to be to get you where you want to go? Talent gets you a team that can play well when the boss is watching. The right culture makes it almost certain that they’ll play exactly the same way when he isn’t.

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Words: iNala Business Coaching