Why Great Teams Win One Play at a Time
With (American) football season right around the corner, I’ve been revisiting some of my highlights from former 49ers coach Bill Walsh’s excellent book, The Score Takes Care of Itself. It’s packed with leadership insights that reach well beyond the field.
One section in particular stands out, especially for those of us thinking about how to build and lead effective teams. It’s called Establishing Your Standard of Performance, and the rules are pretty darn good:
Start with a comprehensive recognition of, reverence for, and identification of the specific actions and attitudes relevant to your team’s performance and production.
Be clarion clear in communicating your expectation of high effort and execution of your Standard of Performance.
Let all know that you expect them to possess the highest level of expertise in their area of responsibility.
Beyond standards and methodology, teach your beliefs, values, and philosophy. An organization is not an inanimate object. It is a living organism that you must nurture, guide, and strengthen.
Teach “connection and extension.” An organization filled with individuals who are “independent contractors” unattached to one another is a team with little interior cohesion and strength.
Make the expectations and metrics of competence that you demand in action and attitudes from personnel the new reality of your organization. You must provide the model for that new standard in your own actions and attitude.
That’s the playbook. And it applies just as much to a business team as it does to a football team.
A football team is a beautifully functional machine, but only when it functions as a team. Each player has a highly specialized role. The left tackle doesn’t need to know how to catch a slant route. The kicker probably isn’t studying blitz pickup. But without coordination and shared intent, all that individual expertise falls apart.
And that’s where so many business organizations stumble. We hire talented people. We build smart functional teams. But we don’t always teach them how to play together. Or why the game matters. Or what winning even looks like.
Here’s how I think Walsh’s six points translate off the field:
Start with reverence for the work. Before you can raise the standard, you have to know what excellence really looks like. That means getting deep into the specifics of what great performance actually requires, in each role, every day.
Be crystal clear about expectations. Ambiguity kills performance. Set the bar high and make it unmistakable. People can’t meet expectations they don’t understand.
Expect expertise. High standards show respect. When you expect people to be great at what they do, and you support them in getting there, they rise to it.
Teach beliefs, values, and philosophy. People need a sense of purpose. Not a purpose statement on the wall. A purpose they can feel in how decisions get made and how people are treated.
Build connection and cohesion. No one wins alone. In a football game, the wide receiver’s effort means nothing if the offensive line can’t protect. Same goes for business teams. If you’re not coordinating across functions, you’re running in place.
Model the standards. Culture is what leaders tolerate and what they embody. If your actions contradict your stated values, the culture will follow your actions, not your slides.
And here’s the kicker (pun intended – sorry, I couldn’t help myself): teams win football games one play at a time. Each play is a short-term goal executed in service of a long-term objective. Great teams understand the flow between the two. They know how to show up for each play with intensity and stay focused on the bigger picture.
Same goes for high-performing organizations. You don’t “win” the quarter just by hitting a number. You win by reinforcing the right habits, the right behaviors, and the right connections over and over again.
So as the season kicks off, maybe take a cue from the coaches: Don’t just write up the plays. Teach the philosophy. Set the standard. Build the connection. And model what winning really looks like.
Then trust that the score will take care of itself.
