Why We Don’t Need to Dim Others to Shine
What we see as coaches with our players every day is a reality that repeats itself once they step into the workplace: same patterns, same reactions, only the setting changes. In sport, the coach is the team’s leader, the group is the culture passed down from the club or the company, and missing a shot or losing a client are among the mistakes we face every single day. Same psychological principles, activated in both contexts.
The question is: in the locker room, what does the team say to itself? Do people blame each other? Is there psychological safety? And by the coffee machine, the corporate locker room by definition, what conversations would we overhear after a mistake?
What would be the difference between a high-performance team and a team that has simply been labeled high-performance? Because there’s a difference, one that shows up in results, between the culture required to compete at the highest level and the illusion that wanting something badly enough is all it takes, with no training beyond closing your eyes tight and wishing for it. And if you don’t get there, well, you just didn’t want it enough, which is why you didn’t try hard enough.
There’s a difference between a leader who understands mistakes as part of the process, who exposes their team to incremental, controlled challenges, who doesn’t punish failure, and who gives people the safety to explore the edges of their own abilities. Because if we never push those limits, even at the risk of falling, how are we ever going to expand them?
You Play the Way You Train, in Business Too
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There are few universal truths, but one of them is this: we are people working with other people, and we have to find a way to become our best version. You don’t need to dim anyone else’s light for yours to shine. And pressure itself is neither good nor bad, it’s how we perceive it.
This can be trained. There’s consensus on the areas that need work to improve how we respond to pressure: pre-competition routines, implicit attention, specific psychological skills training, and mindfulness. This is a reality every high-level athlete practices, but it disappears the moment we trade sneakers for dress shoes. We lose faith in ourselves the moment we belong to a tribe wearing a tie around its neck, which, obviously, cuts off the blood supply to the brain.
I don’t understand why these skills aren’t trained in the professional world, although, little by little, thanks to professionals like Núria Fonts, we’re becoming more aware of these issues.
With teenagers, a coach who doesn’t work with the family environment is only working with half the team. In business, the equivalent is psychological safety: Google’s Project Aristotle, and the later work by Laura Delizonna in Harvard Business Review, found that the common trait among the highest-performing teams wasn’t talent or personality, it was the certainty that they wouldn’t be punished for making mistakes or speaking their mind. Without that climate, people perform out of fear, and fear, sooner or later, disguises itself as perfectionism or silence.
I remember a game, with a team I was working with, after one of the most painful losses of the season. In the locker room, the shooting guard complained the ball came to him too late. The point guard said no one was getting open. The center accused the guard of not waiting for the screen. And the coach, in the end, summed up what everyone was doing: each one looking away, putting their ego above the team, unable to own their individual share of the loss.
After that defeat, the team understood something: looking outward to hide your own mistake was the real problem to solve, not the loss itself. Game by game, they started looking inward before pointing at a teammate. They finished the season in second place in the league.
Now that we have the data, this isn’t the moment to beat ourselves up, it’s the moment to decide what we want: do we build an environment where performance emerges because we take care of our teams and their surroundings, or do we keep punishing mistakes until no one is willing to admit one? The difference between that painful loss and finishing second wasn’t talent, it was that they stopped looking outward. If you recognize any of these patterns in your team, let’s talk. You don’t need to have all the answers, just the willingness to look inward.
Published on tatxe.org
