Coaching a Sports Team or a Business Team Draws from the Same Playbook

Achieving success, whether coaching a sports team or a business team, demands constant and focused preparation towards your goals.

Let’s say that you’re a leader in a company that relies on a complex sales process with a long cycle. What your team is doing right now in preparing to make initial contact with prospects will directly impact whether you will meet your sales goal several months from now. Without adequate preparation, you may be already losing that “game” and nothing your team does later can make up for it. 

Similarly in sports, a team that’s gearing up to play a tough conference game must be taking its preparation seriously throughout the season if the coach hopes to exploit the weakness of the opponent. If the upcoming opponent is, say, weak in handling pressure for a full game, the coach’s own team must be physically capable of applying the relentless pressure in order to win the game.

In both playbooks, if the coach fails to get the team to work hard during preparation, no amount of talent or performance under pressure is going to save it.

Think about the most successful coaches and business leaders among us — such as billionaire and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffet, or legendary women’s college basketball coach Pat Summit, or acclaimed men’s college basketball coach John Wooden. These icons never left anything to chance. Each was committed to excellent preparation, and each achieved sustained success.

As a leader, you show your team exactly how much you care about them achieving success when you place a premium on preparation. This involves instilling the relentless pursuit of two parallel paths — developing a winning mindset and mastering a proven process for sustained success.

These winning mindsets must be in any playbook for either a sports team or a business team:

1. Excellence is its own reward. 

Team members need to believe that their actions, both in small and big ways, matter. Whether it’s simply leaving the break room or locker room cleaner than they found it or, more significantly, accepting responsibility for a crucial mistake, it means adhering to a code of excellence at every turn. By focusing on excellence, long-term rewards will result. When excellence is just what you do, all your preparation maximizes your overall capacity for winning.

2. Belief in sustained success. 

When you create a rock-solid belief in your own ability to achieve and sustain success, you filter your thought processes through this mindset. It becomes a healthy mental filter that screens out unproductive thoughts. Instead of drowning in negativity after a defeat, you honestly analyze what you learned from it, and your belief in your ability to attain sustained success doesn’t waver. 

3. Commitment to constant preparation. 

When I was a graduate assistant to Coach Pat Summit I witnessed how she showed up every day with a consistent mindset on how the University of Tennessee approached the game of basketball. The operative words here are every day. By the habits she created around practice and her program, she instilled the same “every day” ethic in her assistants and her players.

Key to developing the right mindsets is that they reinforce a belief in yourself and keep you from wasting energy on unproductive activities. If your tendency is to overemphasize and overreact to setbacks, you’re wasting energy focused on the outcome instead of thinking, “What processes can we improve to become better prepared for the next situation?”

In mastering a proven process for championship-level success, take a page from the playbook that describes how this three-step process will enable your business or sports teams to win — again and again:

1. Get clarity on your goal and subgoals. 

Become super clear on your main goal. Test it by exploring whether it’s credible given the available resources, and whether it meets the SMART criteria (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely). Clarity on your goal enables you to say “no” to distractions and “yes” to activities that further your progress. 

It’s important to put as much thought into subgoals — the milestone accomplishments along the way — as the overall goal. Use reverse engineering to explore what each backward step below the main goal represents. What are the indicators that the strategy is working? In this way, proceed down each link in the chain and identify what statistical pointers you’ll use as measurements for achieving them.

2. Figure out your strategy for reaching each goal. 

To get you thinking in the right direction regarding strategy, ask yourself, “What central ideas can guide our detailed plan of preparation?” and “Given these goals and subgoals, what strategy (or strategies) can get us there?” A strategy must come from your strengths and core competencies, and shouldn’t go against your identity or values. It should be primarily about your processes and prioritize what you do best. 

Your strategy becomes the lens for decision making. Without it, you might diverge from your goal. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have flexibility. As you regularly evaluate your strategy, recognize when there may be a need to shift gears.

3. Write out a plan. 

Writing down your preparation plan in detail makes the purpose completely clear. While coaching at the University of Kentucky, we had a practice plan that was printed and posted for all to see. It ensured there would be no wasted time or effort. I’m convinced that providing this daily detailed written plan was one of the key reasons we won 70 percent of our games during my tenure at Kentucky. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to get plans out of your head and down on paper (or digital document). 

For every task on your preparation plan, you should be able to say exactly how it fits the strategy and gets you closer to a subgoal. For example, in business, tasks such as how you fulfill your promises to customers must have a significant place in any detailed preparation plan.

When you deeply embed the mindsets and framework of preparation into your playbook for approaching anything you and your team need to accomplish or solve, you’ll uncover a highly productive formula that never fails.

Written By Matthew Mitchell

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Matthew Mitchell is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author, speaker, three-time SEC Coach of the Year, and the winningest head coach in the history of the University of Kentucky women’s basketball program. He now coaches the University of Houston’s women’s basketball team. Mitchell’s new book, Ready to Win: How Great Leaders Succeed Through Preparation (Winning Tools, November 19, 2024) — already a USA Today bestseller — shares proven principles that lead to resilience, preparation, and growth. Learn more at www.coachmatthewmitchell.com.