The secrets sports teams can teach us about building teams

Tl;dr: the methodologies from building sport teams is time-tested and the similarities with autonomous teams is surprisingly close. This article has 4 points you can try with your team to build ambition, structure and psychological safety. This is a long one, but with a bunch of examples.

In 2022, we started a new team in SpareBank 1 Utvikling that would have full focus on the onboarding of new users. A small group of people were put together from different teams to attack the big ambitions the banks had set.

Relatively soon after, we saw several things happen:

1. The results we got were incredibly good. After only a short time we saw increases of 200%, 150% and 100% on various important parameters.
2. Our team were often referred to on both what we achieved, but how we were a positive contrast compared to other teams.
3. Last but not least, we had a lot of fun

The reason why this has happened can’t be briefly summarised. However, something was pretty clear: we operated more like a sports team than an autonomous team.

If you understand Norwegian, my teammate Sonja Porter has done a great talk about our team

Super short background on my sports experience

Many years ago I bet on a career in basketball, both in Norway and USA. Evidently I didn’t turn professional, but there were multiple things I learned that really has been pivotal for my current career (more on that a bit further down in this article)

Sadly, I couldn’t find all the pictures of me doing human altering dunks (pictures from 2004–2005)

Similarities between us and sports teams

Before we head on, I will say that there’s a lot of great resources on how to organise teams. Having said that, the reason why it might be an idea to take inspiration on professional sport teams is that we are actually quite similar:

• The people have most likely spent a lot of time and effort to get where they are
• The people are among high competition with others who want to take their places
• The people are equally dependent on both showing results they can create themselves, but also results that require a group

The circumstance are also very similar:

• You must achieve something that makes a difference, or else you lose
• You are a group with individuals and talents who must function together
• You are a group that must function under (at times) high pressure

The bottom line is that I find myself rather using the mindset and psychology I got from sports about building teams, and I think we underestimate what works well from these time-tested methods.

Teammate Martin B. Grina showing how our head of Jerry Maguire literally went through the roof on a team-bet we had. Picture on the right is at the very start.

What are some of the things we have done

The culture and methods in our team isn’t created by one person, but by everyone in their own way. Someone has pushed for how we should sit, others that we need to celebrate more often and others randomly shouted croissant one day and it just happened to become a thing.

If you’re the designated leader on a team, just know that there should always be multiple leaders that in their own way can elevate the group. Don’t try and stop it because of your insecurity, but “measure your own success by other peoples success”, as Marty Cagen wrote in Empowered.

So, this article could be forever-long, but I’ve noted some important points.

1 — Clear purpose of what you’re trying to achieve

Simon Sinek says it clearly: “Everything we do, we do because we need to challenge the status quo”. If not that, then what is the purpose of working?

When we practised in my basketball days, we went through hours and hours of sweat, pain and stress. We yelled at each other, cheered for each other and grew together by building trust over time. We didn’t do it because we simply played basketball. We did it because we were “one team, one dream” that was going to win it all that year, against all odds. We had a clear why that was the root of every decision that was made.

Highly recommend this video from Simon Sinek that explains The Why

It started with the coaching staff who would constantly remind us of what we wanted to achieve. But, through time it seeded down to the whole team, where it wasn’t a goal for “leadership”, but something all of us craved.

It’s an important distinction that a coach only succeeds if the team succeeds. A coach (leader) isn’t separate from the team, but a part of it.

What’s your teams why?

Every team should, and can, have a clear answer to why they are a team, because it’s the root of everything you do. When you have that, discussion change from what feature you should build, to what takes us closer to what we want to achieve.

Having a clear why is one of the most underrated things many teams miss. The why is owned by the whole team, because the goal is that the whole team should feel ownership to where we are going.

Our why

I think the most important thing with having a mission is that it a) makes sense and b) is easy to remember c) makes you a bit excited.

In a survey done on Norwegians, 33% said they didn’t want to change banks because of the assumed effort they had to put in. In other words, 1/3 Norwegians think changing banks is a pain.

We want to make it revolutionary easy to switch banks. It’s not important for us that SpareBank 1 is the only choice, we just want to be the first and best choice for our users — because we’re that good.

We measure this in increased product range, activity and pains we remove.

That’s it. It’s easy to remember and we mention it all the time (and also have it in our Miro boards). Could it be more epic or cooool? Probably, but don’t be afraid to not overcomplicate things. A complicated strategy or mission can be a disguise for insecurity.

It’s simple, easy to remember and creates great discussions

P.S. If you think it’s hard to come up with a why, just do what everyone else is doing and ask ChatGPT for inspiration.

2 — A clear structure

A clear structure creates two things:

1. A heartbeat within the team: As humans, a stable heartbeat is generally what you want. Life becomes more exciting when that heartbeats at times changes because of some action we do. This is the same for a team. For the most part you want that stability because then creativity and cooperation can flourish within time constrains.
2. Prioritising of time: Procrastinatios friend is time. So is perfection. When there is too much time and a lack of structure, the space for subjective opinions comes in the way of small experiments and actually getting results.

“You need constraints to make good decisions and the best constrain in the world is time. When you’re handcuffed to a hard deadline, you can’t keep trying this and that, changing your mind, putting the finishing touches on something that will never be finished” — Tony Fadell in the book Build (p. 138)

But, to be honest, structure creates another very important thing.

Culture. It’s not the time boxes in itself that creates culture, but the predictability and repetitions. The things I’ll go through in point 3 and 4 happens every week. This is major key. Ceremonial claps, update on a bets, pair programming, experimenting, aligning our ambitions together as a team. All of this happens either every day or week.

What a normal week looks like

We run a pretty standard OKR structure where you have:

• Monday Commitments on Monday (15 min, right before lunch)
• Check in on Tuesday and Wednesday (15 min, right before lunch)
• Fagdag on Thursday (a very cool perk in SpareBank 1 Utvikling)
• Friday Wins on Friday (30 min, at 14:00)

We have Monday to Wednesdays at the office and Thursday and Friday at home (if you want)

What makes the culture is what happens rapidly throughout the week. This shakes stuff up, makes it more fun, but also helps uniting us as a team which in turn allows us to be able to create better solutions and results.

Simplified view on lots of random stuff that really isn’t that random

If you’re interested in reading more about this OKR structure, I recommend reading the great book Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke or about a OKR journey (in Norwegian) by Thomas Allan Nygaard.

3 — Consistent collaboration over time

When you have structure, the next step is to make it easy for collaboration. It’s only when people can work together over time where they build trust.

Just as practice, only when you have worked together in large volumes can you build a true flow together. You need talent, but individual talent doesn’t have value in a team if there isn’t trust within the group. It’s a cliche, but there is no I in team, and to win over time you need everyone to work together as a unit.

With that, here’s some examples of what we do to enable consistent collaboration.

Sitting back to back in a circle

Honestly, every team, if the size makes sense, should do this. It’s a game changer when you sit in a circle formation (or horse shoe formation) because it will automatically fix many of the common issues teams has.

• It creates a home for the team
• Free flow for everyone to talk to each other
• Makes it very simple to have spontaneous huddles
• Makes it very simple to collaborate with team mates

Sitting in a circle creates a way better flow for collaboration compared to the traditional set up

It opens up for way better communication between different professions. No longer is it us vs them between developers and design (for example).

Photo of our home with Geir Olav, Kristoffer and Nora talking while Martin is at the far end

Datadriven experiments

Nothing humbles people more that doing a hypothesis, thinking it will be a home run, only to see it do worse than the original design — but the beauty is it doesn’t matter and eventually you’ll end up loving short term failure.

The more experience I get in my career, the more comfortable I am in saying that I really don’t know how a change will turn out. The only thing we can do is do an estimated guess (hypothesis/experiment) and look at the data afterwards.

If you read Norwegian, you can read more about starting with hypothesis here:

Hvordan hypoteser og små seire kan skape en vinnerkultur (Del 1/3)

We often talked about that “we win together and we lose together” in basketball, which is also a mantra we have at our team. Looking at what we want to achieve as a team, we must be willing to take chances that can lead to short them failure which creates long term success.

A testing and learning card we use for every hypothesis. It forces us to be clear what we think and what we want to measure

Being okay with failing is something that needs to be learned. Especially for people that has taken higher education, the value of not failing has been set too high for too long.

Have a central place the whole team can look at insight/learning/strategy

I embrace the chaos of product development, but Miro is a great tool to organise that chaos. To be truly great at onboarding, we need to know 10x of what are options our, so we can truly understand what’s worth working on.

We have multiple Miro boards that we as a team look at all the time. It’s where we are when we talk about insight, strategy, possibilities, Monday commitments and Friday wins.

An extra beauty of this is that you can show the exact same Miro boards to the stakeholders. No longer is it necessary to create heaps of Power Points. Just show what you working on in Miro and have a conversation. Stakeholders love this, in my experience, because they get to be in on the action.

We have multiple boards in Miro where we work all the time. Nothing is hidden in power points or folders.

Talk talk talk

Consistent collaboration also means that we as a team constantly have to talk together. Since we have gained psychological safety, we can have honest talks of what is good and what can be changed. If something isn’t talked about, it usually comes up in our weekly Friday wins retros.

Like a good relationship — what you want is to talk so much that there is no unnecessary frustration building up. Retros are a good tool for this. We have it almost every Friday Wins, because you can have it once a month (at a minimum)

If you want people in your team to open up and talk about things they are insecure about, start with yourself. There is no charm in never showing weakness. Lead by example.

4 — Internal roles, traditions and lingo within the team

Once a team gets to know each other, they start to understand what they and others can contribute to so the team can win. In basketball, some are really good shooters, other rebounders, passers, defence makers, force in the post or a good “floor general”.

When you know each others strengths, the game flows on a different level.

The same is for business. In your team, everyone has different skillsets that in total creates a united group. You can force these discoveries through techniques like Team Kanvas, but you will also learn it through time — if you prioritise to focus on it.

Simply by:

1. Working together towards a common goal
2. Ask questions — be curious

Just pay attention how everyone communicates together. See if someone thrives or gets stuck on certain tasks. Ask the people in private what they like to focus and, and what they want to get better at. Be curious on what they do outside of work.

Just be a human talking to another human. Don’t overthink this.

Give constant feedback too. If someone does something cool, yell a “yiiihaa” while you clap — if it feels right for you. I always try to cheer on my teammates in public, but also give specific praise in person or DMs.

I feel this is best if it’s spontaneous. I find it more weird if we have a scheduled meeting where I will sit and give you compliments. It’s better to have a spontaneous moment where I’m just being honest in the moment, where that moment is relevant.

Be genuin about it. You do this because you work with cool people (probably). Psyhcological safety isn’t a solution, but a result of alot of things.

Traditions and internal lingo

A very underrated thing is to have internal lingo and traditions in your team. It’s a big part of what creates culture.

Under every basketball game, we did numerous things. Some of it were:

• Coach had a pep talk in the locker room
• We had a collective pray (non-Christians were included 😅)
• We shouted “one team, one dream” will joining hands
• We hit the schools slogan platter as we ran out the door
• We always did the same layup drill and always ended it the same way
• and much much more

In practise we had others traditions and lingo we used. The magic is that it creates a rhythm and culture.

Some of the internal lingo and traditions we have now are:

Examples of things we say and do

I’m almost a bit hesitant to show it, because it’s our thing. I honestly couldn’t give a shit if anyone else thinks it’s weird, cheesy or unnecessary. It works for us, and that’s my number 1 priority.

I’m not going into detail on everything, but I can say that:

• We always ask if what we do will make the boat go faster (origin). It has a story, but it’s also a very nice way of prioritising.
• We raise a Danish flag that I bought of someone so we could celebrate more often. One day two people on our team said we should celebrate more and joked about getting a flag pole. I found that funny, and bought it the same day. It’s a Danish flag because that’s what the guy had when I picked it up. It’s become a meme. We celebrate everything from results to private happenings.
• We always end our regular mettings with a one-clap. We have tested many claps, but our Geir Olav introduced the one clap and it stuck. Because good meetings should always end with a bang.

We tested out maaaaaany other things. Some stuck and others don’t.

First: every meeting ends with a cerimonial one clap. Here with Nora, Martin, Sonja and Kristoffer. Second: Sonja with our Danish flag in front of our Jerry Maguire wall of money.

If you want to start bringing in traditions and lingo to your team, here’s some tips:

1. Don’t force it, because it’ll just get awkward
2. But sometimes you have to force it, and it’ll get a bit awkward, but it’s worth it. Eyes on the prize!
3. Don’t do it because you want to team build, do it because it’s fun!
4. Stick your neck out. If I would find it funny if someone shouted “yeah maddafakka” in an excited tone while they threw an invisible cowboy hat (I would), I can’t wait for someone else to magically do it. I just do it and see if there’s any reaction
5. Start small. Being consistent with a funny Slack emoji is progress
6. When people leave the team, be willing to loose some traditions and lingo
7. When people join the team, create new traditions and lingo

Some traditions should stand like a rock. We have:

• We win together and fail together (one team, one dream)
• Will it make the boat go faster?
• One clap
• Raise Danish flag

These are things that are culture and traditions in our team. Other things come and go. And that’s ok.

5 — Psychological safety

Yes, the thing I’ve mentioned too many times now. You can say that point 1–4 is the result of this point. I’ve written a whole article about it here:

Why focusing on psychological safety as a solution doesn’t create psychological safety in your team

So remember:

A team wins together and fails together

The people is the business

Do more experiments

Celebrate more

Have fun!

Damn, you made it to the end! 🎉

If you would like more stories like these, you can check out Failing Forward.

P.S. If you want to read about how we worked strategically, check out: Everyone Can Do Strategy

P.S.S. You can of course follow me on Medium, and Linkedin or Goodreads.