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7 Lessons from NBA Teams That Will Help Your Company Win

The financial incentives involved in building a winning NBA team have created a great laboratory to understand what truly drives success and lasting performance.  It’s worth learning what works and what doesn’t for the most successful teams in the league.

As an example, 30 years ago it was sufficient to have one truly talented player to put a team in contention for a championship. Now that number is more like three players are needed at that level and even that isn’t enough. Coaching must be solid as well as having backing from the front office. The bench has become increasingly important as good starting line-ups see their solid lead eaten within a few minutes because the backups aren’t up to the task.

In other words, building a winning team is a complex business. Here are a few elements that explain the success of the league’s top teams ...

Effort Goes A LONG Way

Even if the rest of the elements below are lacking, effort can help you win plenty! Watch 10 NBA games and at least four of them will be won by an underdog exhibiting an effort-driven "scrappiness". 

Much has been written and said about the importance of effort and that’s for good reason … it works! It is the one thing that anybody, at any time, and anywhere can employ to immediate results and benefits. 

Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t spend time in the areas below, but think what can happen when you join intense effort to incredible talent, brilliant coaching, integrity, and so on. Be it championships or amazing product launches … here we come.

Talent Matters ... A Lot

There is a good reason the top names command top contracts with massive amounts of money and perks ... raw skill is highly correlated to game performance.

Much has been said about how effort trumps talent, and that may very well be true. If, however, you are looking to build a championship-level NBA team or a top-performing company you better put aside the cliche and instead focus on building the best team you can.

This article from Harvard Business Review references findings that a few talented people usually have an outsized effect within both their companies and their industries. The good news is that talent can be built. It requires humility as evidenced through learnability and that can be tough to find.

What do you do if you can’t currently afford the rock stars? Focus on individuals that show promise AND are teachable. They’ll be your future stars.

Coaching is Critical

Things don't always go as expected and it often comes down to a good coach that helps the team make adjustments and remain flexible.

Coaching talent can be hidden during times when the team itself is so talented or the competitive environment so unbalanced that seemingly just about anybody could lead out. When things go wrong, however, it becomes very clear who has the real talent for helping a team navigate challenges and complexity.

What’s the lesson here? Don’t be cocky, instead focus on delivering value that builds the team and helps you all see the big picture. Keep your eyes wide open and seek improvement during good times and bad. And don’t let anybody, especially leaders, succumb to the arrogance of success.

Organizational Integrity

Open, honest dialogue from ownership and executives creates trust and quiets drama. This allows the team and entire organization to focus on the business it's designed for whether that's making baskets or widgets.

A lack of integrity will eventually show its face in the form of deceit and finger-pointing. Work to keep issues out in the open, especially the hard ones and don’t shy away from admitting failure. Everybody makes mistakes, it’s the arrogance shown when those mistakes are ignored or denied that truly does the damage.

Diversity

It wouldn't do any NBA team any good to put nothing but 7-foot centers on the court or all 6-foot guards, either. It also wouldn’t work to have coaches that only understand one style of play or a single element of the game. Diversity of skills, physical gifts, and experience will help build a team ready to tackle anything.

Having players, coaches, and staff of different backgrounds also helps build a culture of awareness and foresight. This increases confidence within the team that challenges can be overcome as a diverse team has likely just about seen it all.

As you build your team, make sure you are gathering people that offer differences in skill, perspective, and experience to increase your chances of success.

Compensation

While there is a limit to how much impact explicit financial rewards have on overall performance, one thing is clear ... it better be enough for the team to feel valued. If there is one thing that creates conflict and imbalance in a team, it's having the members feel like they are under-appreciated while others are over-appreciated.

Make sure that your compensation matches both expectations and the eye test. How would members of your organization respond if the books were thrown open and everybody knew what each other was making? If that is a terrifying thought to you ... be terrified. At this point, nobody should be surprised that those things leak out and become known.

The Process

No, we don't mean Joel Embiid. Yes, he was part of a stunning process of transformation at the 76ers ... but plenty of teams have seen success from employing a well thought out process in shaping their teams to a championship-caliber level of performance.

Employing a strategic view on creating wins and value is a must. Don't let its place on this list fool you into thinking it the least important. Consider this an encouragement to think of all the above items in the context of a process. When considering each element, put them in the context of the others and design a plan that delivers real value over time. That's the way to success.

Real, lasting success is nuanced and only comes from a combination of many things going well and a few things going brilliantly. One of the mistakes that many teams and organizations make is relying on one aspect of performance while thinking that it will be enough to deliver the results of the organization. It is important to be thoughtful and holistic in your approach to work and the team. Better understanding your strengths and weaknesses can equip you to take advantage of  the strong and build increasing capabilities around the vulnerable parts of the organization.

How Do You Stack Up?

If you would like to see how you and your company are doing, take this free assessment that will also tell you which NBA team your organization is most like.

See What NBA Team You Are Playing For

Last updated: March 27, 2020

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Coming to Know What You Don’t Know

As business leaders and owners, we hope that we have our finger on the pulse of the important things in our business. In fact, we probably are clued into many if not most of those things that represent the essential opportunity and risk inherent in our business. That said, we are actually more likely to be disconnected or even clueless about major areas of risk. This isn’t because we are bad business-people, it’s because the limits of our brains dictate that we categorize and sort and that leaves us open to ignore potential issues.

Years ago, I was part owner of a thriving and growing business … until it wasn’t. It seemed like in one day our fortunes had changed from GREAT to Uh-oh. Before the shift, I couldn’t envision anything going wrong. Once it was going wrong, I was too stressed and befuddled to figure out what was happening. I was in the type of survival mode that almost never leads to survival and my case was not an exception.

It was shortly after I had unspun from the business that I sat down to think about what had happened. After weeks of post-mortem analysis and thought I realized that my partner and I were overconfident in certain areas of the business and that led us to discount other areas where we lacked strength. Ultimately, it was these areas of weakness that doomed the business.

It was this experience that led to the creation of the SuccessTarget.com survey (click here). The hope of SuccessTarget is not to be the planet’s most analytically rigorous assessment. In fact, it has been my experience that while academic surveys are usually rock solid from a mathematical point-of-view … they aren’t necessarily helpful and often not widely applicable to many different types of organizations.

The purpose of the SuccessTarget survey is to illuminate areas of potential opportunity and risk in your organization and to do it in a way that allows you to benchmark. The survey results are divided into six main areas (Personal, InterPersonal, Teaming, Organization, Marketplace, Societal) and each of those are further subdivided into 4-6 topic areas in the deeper reports available. This categorization and subdivision has been created to allow leaders, managers, and staff to quickly identify areas needing attention.

The survey itself is under 50 questions and usually takes less than 7 minutes to complete. Again, we’re going for usefulness over pinpoint accuracy. We also deliver results in percentile format because we believe it’s more helpful to understand where you stand when benchmarked against other teams, organizations, and people.

Our plea here at SuccessTarget is simple … spend a few minutes to answer the questions. Doing so will help you come to know what you might not yet know.

Take Survey for Free Now

Last updated: December 13, 2017

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Summary of Perspectives - Me v Others v Org

We’ve been collecting data on SuccessTarget for a while and we’ve learned some pretty interesting things we’d like to share. We hope that this sharing will be helpful to you as a business owner, a manager of people, or somebody responsible for making workplaces more effective, human, and … well … workable.

If you aren’t interested in the background and just want the data … go here.

How We’ve Categorized the Data

First, some background. The assessment itself is currently comprised of 44 questions that are connected to 6 different major categories of influence and 25 topic areas of growth and learning. On top of this, we’ve collected and collated the data in a way that is a bit more hidden.

One of the ways we’ve sliced the data is by perspective. Is a given question oriented toward “me”? “Others”? The “organization”? And does that change how I answer? We wanted to be able to categorize the data this way to help us create better baselines around how a particular person’s view might be skewing their responses. We’ve seen that but also a whole lot more.

You, Me, and Us

Along with the three perspectives of “me”, “others”, and “organization” we also looked at the gap between the perspectives. For instance, how large is the gap between how I see myself and how I rate others and is that gap positively or negatively biased. In other words, do I see the people around me as fundamentally worse or better than me. We also looked at gaps between me v. the organization and others v. the organization.

We looked at six different perspectives …

Single-Sided	Comparison
Me (view)	Me v. Others (view)
Others (view)	Me v. Organization (view)
Organization (view)	Others v. Organization (view)

The Demographic Dive

It turns out, these perspective views (and associated gaps) become really interesting when they are associated with how they express within demographics. When taking the assessment we ask respondents to indicate four (4) areas of personal categorization and four (4) areas of organizational categorization.

Personal	Organizational
Age	Size of Organization by Revenue
Gender	Size of Organization by # Employees
Education Level	Industry
Number Employees Reporting to Them	Functional Area Within Organization

Me, Other, Org Interesting Insights

Some insights only start to emerge when we look at the differences between the three perspectives ("me", "others", "organization"). So let's start looking ...

 

 

Last updated: December 12, 2017

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Business Failure Diagnosis: Internal Bleeding

Business failures are common to the tune of about 50% of companies won’t exist five years after starting. The numbers get more dismal the further out you look. These failures can be the result of a bad product/market mix, fumbling a launch, investing in the wrong things … or a number of other factors.

Often, an unarticulated reason for business failure could be given the name “internal bleeding”. Internal bleeding is characterized by a company that has deeply negative issues around their people or processes that are largely invisible to both those inside and outside of the company. They come in the form of disengaged employees that show up but do little to drive the business forward. Or a passive-aggressive culture that emphasizes “nice-ness” over respect and effectiveness.

As an example, recently a smaller division of a large company with multiple worksites engaged a firm to help them with some cultural issues. After working with the firm on increasing engagement, collaboration, and respect within this team of about 100 people … real success was being made. Upper levels of management and other departments didn’t understand the ways in which this group was attempting to be more helpful and surprisingly saw it as a threat. Instead of trying to understand the potential benefits, they punished this group for spending the time they had on seeking to better understand their stakeholders. After having “seen the light” of a better way to work, the improving team was devastated by the reaction. At last point of contact, about 50 of the original 100 team members had left the company in search of a culture they now desired but couldn’t see they lacked under their former organization’s culture and system.

These issues will often be written off as “normal workplace friction” or rationalized as not being any worse than what you find at other firms. That may be true, but a general lack of visibility into how we really do benchmark allows us to rationalize what might be a toxic virus in an ever-declining system.

We must, therefore, be diligent in finding the truth and understanding anything that might indicate cracks in the foundation of our continuing success. Regular, open conversations with our people is the single best way to get a clear view of those realities and should be happening anyway.

At times, a more indirect method can be highly useful as well. The SuccessTarget.com survey will give you a view not only into your team performance and sentiment, but will also do it by area (For instance, is it a teaming issue? Or an interpersonal issue?) and let you know how you rank (by percentile) against other organizations. The survey itself takes about 5 minutes to complete and can help you and your team immensely.

Take Survey for Free Now

Last updated: August 05, 2017

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