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This year’s Super Bowl XLIX isn’t simply between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots.
It’s a showcase for a team culture that thrives under pressure, an understanding between individuals that finds a way to achieve in the face of great obstacles.
This is the kind of culture that any team, in sports or business, needs to have. It’s extraordinarily simple, and simply extraordinary.
What happens in crisis
A thriving team culture gives each team member a sense of shared purpose and responsibility. This is the foundation for success in crisis, when a team’s weaknesses are most likely to show. Each team member needs a simple, powerful set of reliable tools that help him or her defy fear and remain confident.
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” NFL champion coach Tony Dungy explained to writer Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”
Echoing Dungy, Seattle head coach Pete Carroll’s “Win Forever” mantra encourages his players to focus on the long-term impact of each small habit. As Carroll says: “To accomplish the grand, you have to focus on the small. To exist in the eternal perspective, you have to live in the moment.”
Team culture requires consistency
There’s the key: consistency, the necessary ingredient of habits. Dungy took the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Indianapolis Colts to the Super Bowl because his players had mastered his system. “They have practiced over and over until the behaviors are automatic,” Duhigg noted. “If his players think too much or hesitate or second-guess their instincts, the system falls apart.”
This year’s Super Bowl teams feature incredibly consistent systems. They have gone beyond practicing their sport to practicing winning. They play their best when the stakes are high and distractions are many. No matter what, they maintain a consistent focus.
Carroll fosters an atmosphere in which each player and coach find support for his unique skills and accountability to the team. Focus is essential. When he interviews a potential staff member, Carroll asks, “Can you explain your coaching philosophy in 25 words or less?” The Seahawks could become the first team to defend a Super Bowl title since 2004.
That year, the Patriots won a second consecutive Super Bowl, en route to 14 straight winning seasons, the best in the NFL. The owners, head coach and quarterback have stayed steady, and the team culture is so engrained that it is known throughout the league as “The Patriot Way.” Since the pairing of head coach Bill Belichick and star quarterback Tom Brady, the Patriots have achieved the highest winning percentage in American professional sports and appeared in the Super Bowl a record six times.
Your Game Changer Takeaway
Your team competes to win clients, reach goals, and beat the competition. How consistent is your “Super Bowl” strategy? Can your team members “ignore the outside voices” like Patriots quarterback Tom Brady? Can you “bend but not break” like the Seahawks, according to safety Kam Chancellor?
A Super Bowl team won’t have a system that matches its opponent, but the Super Bowl winner always executes its plan more consistently.
Molly Fletcher helps inspire and equip game changers to lead well and with purpose. Her book, “A Winner’s Guide to Negotiating: How Conversation Gets Deals Done” (McGraw-Hill, 2014), draws on her decades as a sports agent and negotiator on behalf of pro athletes, coaches and broadcasters. Sign up here for our newsletter.
