Successful teams play two games: a sharp outer game, driven by a strong inner game – Rob Shaw shows you how to win at both
Discovering what may be getting in the way of your team’s effectiveness can’t be left to guesswork. According to our data from over 20,000 team members around the world, 41% of teams struggle with improving collaboration and only one in eight teams consider themselves as being strong at making the changes they need to grow. These challenges and distractions often lead to decreased team engagement, lower productivity and poor performance.
The answer? Provide team leaders with a tool kit that breaks up old patterns of behaviour, rewires team instincts, and builds new habits through learning by doing. So how can team leaders build better ways of working in their teams, and avoid falling back into familiar less-productive patterns?
Team leaders should focus on creating a series of small wins, each one just challenging enough to push the boundaries of the status quo without overwhelming the team
Win at both the inner and outer game
We’ve found the best performing and most engaged teams are always playing two games – a well-honed outer game built from a mature inner game. Both are essential in building a winning team.
The inner game lays down the foundations for team performance through four essential habits: building trust for engaging in tough conversations; strengthening resilience to overcome challenges; fostering mutual accountability with a strong shared purpose; and driving impact outcomes through prioritised focus.
Master the inner game
The fastest route for team leaders to master this inner game is by first identifying and then reducing interference – the self-doubt, fear of loss, and negative self-talk that can keep a team’s foot on the brake.
Understand the outer game
The outer game is grounded in four quite different team habits: adapting at speed through curiosity, reflection and experimentation; creating value for tomorrow with agility; deepening influence with key stakeholders through inspiration; and continuously refining the team’s decisiveness, consistency and speed of taking action.
Enhanced performance and productivity are achieved through a stronger outer game, which is where many teams focus their effort but without a sufficiently strong inner game. All our data shows that when a team’s inner game is weak, so is their outer game. The opposite is also true. When an inner game is strong, this manifests in a strong outer game, enabling the team to operate at peak performance.
A balanced approach is crucial where team leaders must simultaneously focus on both the inner and outer games. Without this balance, teams risk reverting to their familiar ways of working, leading to frustration that can seriously impact progress.
Switch off autopilot
Once established and running on autopilot, team leaders can find patterns of behaviours and habits increasingly difficult to break. It’s essential for the team leader to notice unproductive meeting habits, ineffective communication between team members, or inefficient hand-offs between colleagues.
These behaviours that put a brake on the team’s effectiveness cannot be fixed by traditional training. Instead, the team leader must embrace a ‘learning by doing’ approach – where they guide their teams through real-world practice, feedback and consistent reinforcement rather than one-off instructions.
When this type of team learning transforms into a daily practice rather than a checklist item, its impact extends far beyond any training session, building the team’s capacity to act, not just to know.
Learn from within
Most of the team leaders we work with struggle with limited bandwidth: our data shows 79% are distracted by competing priorities. We’ve found that trying to fix team collaboration by pouring in knowledge and skills with traditional training approaches doesn’t work. Instead, team leaders must focus on drawing out the intelligence and potential that already exists within their teams by activating the capabilities that already exist.
There are no shortcuts with this type of experiential learning, it requires active participation and persistence. Each team leader must be resourceful in using their own strengths to gradually build new behavioural patterns with the team gradually over time, it isn’t likely to be sustainable with a single burst of effort. The team leader’s role is to guide their team through these changes until new more productive habits take root through their team member’s own efforts.
Don’t spook the elephant!
When teams are pushed too hard or too fast, burnout and disengagement often follow. Instead, team leaders should focus on creating a series of small wins, each one just challenging enough to push the boundaries of the status quo without overwhelming the team.
By focusing on the right blend of inner and outer habits that lift their team’s foot off the brake through gradual and persistent hands-on learning, team leaders can build collaborative, highly engaged, productive and high-performing teams.
