McKinsey Senior Partner Seth Goldstrom has spent three decades advising some of the world’s leading companies on how to improve performance. More recently, he has been looking to a different set of high performers for inspiration: world-class athletes, teams, and coaches.
This work has led to Winning, a new framework to help organizations reach their full potential, grounded in eight behaviors that consistently appear among elite performers. Through conversations with championship coaches, Olympic athletes, team executives, and others at the top of their fields, the research has explored what distinguishes those who win repeatedly—and which of those lessons can translate to business.
In the first episode of the Winning video series, Goldstrom introduces the eight behaviors and explores what they could mean for leaders and organizations seeking to raise their game.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
‘Tattoo winning’
The first theme we’ve seen for how winning teams not only dominate but create dynasties is what we call “tattoo winning.” There’s this obsession in the minds of these teams, athletes, or coaches: something written in indelible ink, whether it’s an actual tattoo or one imprinted on someone’s mind. They wake up every day thinking, “How am I going to get to this goal?” The goal can change over time. It may start with, “I just want to be in the Olympics,” and then evolve from “I want to win a medal” to “I want to win gold.” But all of these successful athletes and teams have a clear goal imprinted on them, and one they obsess over every day.
One of the things [American football] coach Nick Saban says a lot, and which I find powerful, is: “Mediocre people don’t like high achievers, and high achievers don’t like mediocre people.” Getting those two groups to agree on what the tattoo of winning, to me, is a bit of a false hope.
We see that a lot in business. When trying to get people to agree on a big target, no one wants to overpromise and underdeliver. Many people want to get by and be average, but it’s special to strive for something distinctive or elite. Articulating the goal in a way that’s deeply meaningful to the top team but can also cascade down and get people excited is hard, but it’s important.
We’ve also seen examples of people with audacious goals who are committed to them without “rescue boats.” Javier Báez, a great baseball player, got a Major League Baseball tattoo on the back of his neck when he was younger, before he’d even made the majors. His point was: I’m not washing this off. This goal is permanent, and I’m going to achieve it.
The accountable plan
The second element we see is that there’s always a plan. How do you translate that tattoo into getting there and achieving it? Bob Bowman, the great coach for [Olympic swimmer] Michael Phelps, describes his job as building the plan that enables his athlete to reach their goals. At some level, that’s similar to what we do as management consultants.
Another famous triathlon coach says a goal or tattoo without a concrete plan is just a wish or a dream. His job as a coach isn’t about dreaming; it’s about achieving and delivering.
Jeff Galloway, an Olympic athlete in the 1970s who passed away this year, is known for his books on marathon running and training. Jeff told people, “If you can come to me running three miles, I can get you to a marathon in six months.” He’d build a plan over six months, so you could look at it on any day and say, “I can do that.”
When you execute the plan daily for six months, amazing things happen. Countless people have gone on to follow Jeff’s plan to run marathons, including myself.
Another athlete we’ll feature in an upcoming episode is Kristen Faulkner, an amazing cyclist who talks about her T-shaped strategy. The broad part of the T is all the different capabilities you need to be competitive. The spike of the T is, “This is what’s going to let me win.” When you think about building this plan, you have to figure out which capabilities you need to put in place and then determine what will let you dominate.
That also translates well into our work with clients. There’s a component of what you do daily: your activities, Gantt charts, or work plans. The second part that athletes talk about is metrics, input or output, whether it’s their pace, heart rate, or VO2 max. We should know what metrics we are watching. A third is the results, when you see it translate into your time or into winning.
It’s also about how you cascade the plan through the entire organization, so that everyone from the CEO to the front line has a view of what they need to do today, tomorrow, next week, and next quarter.
Evolving the roster
The third element you see, particularly with teams, is how you evolve the roster. There are great examples of general managers in sports building their rosters. Think of Moneyball—the movie and the book—and Billy Beane’s approach to using data to separate luck from underlying performance and talent.
As you build a team and think about your T-shaped strategy, for the broad set of capabilities you need to be competitive, you might pay for that differently than you would for what’s going to drive the spike that lets you win. If you’re a running football team, you pay up for your offensive line and running back to win, and the receivers may not be as important.
We’ve asked clients, “Does your CHRO [chief human resources officer] act like a general manager of a sports team? Do you have a road map tied back to that T-shaped strategy, the capabilities you have to invest in over time to be successful?”
Another element of evolving the roster is something we call at McKinsey “talent to value.” Certain roles in the organization drive disproportionate value, and they’re not necessarily the highest-paid or most senior roles. You know these 20 or 30 roles are going to make you successful or are critical to achieving your winning vision over the next several years.
One thing tied to that: Often, the roles that drove the most value over the past five to ten years aren’t the roles that will drive the most value over the next five to ten. Coach Saban, when talking about mediocre people and high achievers not getting along, described his role in training as figuring out how to get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off it. The same is true for a GM, a CEO, or a CHRO.
Seeking an edge ruthlessly
The fourth element is what we’ve referred to as seeking an edge ruthlessly: How do you get a little bit better? There are many ways athletes and teams go about it. There’s an element of looking at data and advanced analytics: think of basketball’s move toward three-point shots and away from long twos.
It could be product or technology advances, such as carbon-plated running shoes that let you go 1 to 2 percent faster. It could be AI informing your strategy. But it’s all about this drive to get a little bit better.
Roger Federer, in his commencement address at Dartmouth College, shared that, as one of the world’s most dominant tennis players, he won 20 Grand Slams and 80 percent of his matches, but had won only 54 percent of his points. What struck me was that going from 50 percent to 54 percent created one of the most successful tennis players of all time. That’s a very small difference leading to a disproportionate outcome.
[US Olympic swimmer] Katie Ledecky gave a fabulous commencement address at Stanford University. She shared that when she was young and dreamed of being an Olympic athlete, her father gave her a stopwatch and told her that races are decided by fractions or hundredths of a second.
In the business context, we often hear people say, “There’s no opportunity here” or “I’ve done everything I possibly can.” But all of these athletes say, “Once you have the mindset that you can’t get any better than you are today, that’s when you should retire.”
One of the best examples of seeking edge ruthlessly is the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles and their “Tush Push” play. You know you’ve done a great job seeking edge when someone tries to make what you’ve made so successful illegal or changes the rules so you can’t do it anymore.
The other thing we see is that clients often have a portfolio of initiatives underway because the board asked, “What are you doing on AI? What are you doing on advanced analytics?” Sometimes it feels more like science experiments they’re being forced to do, rather than a deliberate portfolio of projects driving the spike in their T, or a portfolio of experiments they believe will get them a couple of percentage points better.
The relentless data review
The fifth theme is what we call obsessive data review. All the athletes and teams we’ve talked to look at data in ways that weren’t as common a few decades ago.
We’ve seen a trend toward using real-time and “de-averaged” data. To give a football example, Monday film review after a Sunday game has always been the norm. Now, on the sidelines during a game, you’ll see teams looking at tablets to see what happened in the previous play, essentially in real time.
Wearables are another example of de-averaged data. My Garmin watch will tell me it detected an abnormality in my temperature or my HRV [heart rate variability] overnight: it’s looking at hundreds of things, but it’s not just telling me my average, it’s also flagging deviations.
Another great example of real-time data and monitoring is in swimming. A company called Form has created swimming goggles that show real-time data as you’re swimming. The AR [augmented reality] displays your pace, how many yards you’ve swum, and your heart rate, so you know in real time how you’re doing, lap by lap. The data flows into an app where you can review your splits and get a score on how to improve.
What we find, in business and in sports, is that it’s the deviations that really matter. Obsessive data review of the metrics that matter most for your business, in real time, when you can take corrective action in the moment, makes an enormous difference. We’re starting to see companies leverage AI to do exactly that. If you’ve been watching the FIFA World Cup, you’ve seen soccer players wearing real-time monitors so coaches can see who needs to come out.
In a business context, people are often reluctant to share their monthly sales data or ratings. In sports, that’s visible to everybody. For some people, there’s an element of “I don’t want to know bad things,” and there are others who think, “I want to know, but I don’t want anyone else to know.”
A customized system
The sixth thing we’re seeing is the idea of a customized system. In McKinsey’s transformation practice, we’ve long followed a process built around driving results, cadence, and metrics, a bit of a forced march. It is very effective, but a lot of people hate it. There’s an element of needing a system tailored to you and your organization, one you enjoy and that gives you comfort.
That held up in all the interviews we did with athletes. They often talked about what they don’t like and how they try to make those aspects easier, such as laying out their gear the night before to reduce friction. There’s also the treat: After a hard workout, they’ll stop for a sweet treat or a cup of coffee at their favorite place.
For people to stick with a system, they have to like it. That’s obvious at some level, but in business, for instance, you have QBRs [quarterly business reviews] and Monday morning meetings, but do you have a celebratory dinner afterward? How do you bring joy into the process alongside the parts you know you have to do?
There’s also an element of social accountability: presenting your plan and data for everyone to see, which reinforces sticking with the system. For most endurance athletes, consistency matters. In terms of improving, it’s better to have seven workouts throughout the week than one Herculean workout on a single day. There’s a proliferation of apps and software that enable consistency and build a community around them. Apps like Strava or TrainingPeaks can work with training plans and have coaches to assign workouts, and wearables can inform the person in training how well they performed.
The winning mindset
The seventh notion we see is about having a winning mindset, with five or six components that recurred across our interviews. The first is being gritty, which one person described as the antithesis of fragile. I think of it as a maniacal drive to be better, to persevere.
The second mindset is being stoically resilient: worrying about what you can control and setting aside things you can’t. If you’re running in a race, you can’t worry about the weather, but you can prepare for it. You can’t control whether you get a flat tire, but you can plan for which tire is most puncture-resistant, or learn how to change one in tough conditions.
The third is to be adaptable. With coaches who’ve won over and over and built a dynasty, the way they won the third or fourth time usually isn’t the way they won the first or second time. They’ve had to adjust to different personnel, new strategies, and competitors who adapt. They’ve had to adapt to keep winning in different conditions.
The fourth is to be positive and grateful. Most world-class athletes we’ve talked to are glass-half-full people. That mindset ports well into business: When you’re frustrated with your job or your boss, it helps to remember, “I’m grateful to have this job and to be able to provide for my family. If I can’t have that attitude, I should go do something else.”
The fifth mindset is balancing extremes. Faulkner, the cyclist, talks in her podcast about knowing when to take a risk and when to be prudent. It’s about being on a slippery descent during a race and knowing when to go full gas or when to recover from training. Not every day can be a personal-record day.
Sixth is an always-learning and curious mindset: a voracious desire to read, study, review film, research, or listen to podcasts like this one. There must be a desire to always look for what can make you better, recognize you’re not perfect today, and keep an open mind.
In business, there’s a lot that could be done to screen for mindset when hiring or evaluating a top team. Many employers look for former college athletes for this reason. Some of this mindset shows up in behavioral interviews: Medical school essays ask candidates to give examples of when they were resilient, or a piece of feedback they received. In real time, rather than in an essay for which you get more time to answer, it’s possible to get a sense of one’s mindset.
The coaching team
Finally, I’ve yet to find a world-class athlete or team without a coach or some level of help. Often, athletes have more than one coach. In golf, a nutritionist and an analytics person help the golfer think through strategies, such as what’s your best lay-up range?
One of the important things a coach provides is candid feedback, which sometimes means hearing things you don’t want to hear, and getting real-time, unvarnished input. At most companies, you’re evaluated once a year, which can feel like a rubber stamp. How much of that is meaningful feedback versus an evaluation, which can be compared to having a coach who gives you feedback every day? It’s very different. The best CEOs routinely talk about the importance of candid feedback: Bill Gates and [former Google CEO] Eric Schmidt have both spoken about the value of having a coach.
Faulkner says candid feedback goes a lot further when it comes from someone who deeply cares about you and has a personal relationship with you. When feedback comes from someone with whom there’s trust and from a place of genuinely caring for your success, it is very different from feedback in a business context, where it can feel evaluative and comes from someone who perhaps doesn’t care about you.
The big picture
There are many good examples of situations where teams pull all of this together. If you’ve ever watched a Formula 1 Racing pit stop to change out all four tires, everyone in the pit knows their role and where they’re supposed to be. They have a process, review it afterward, and track metrics. But getting all those tires on and off in a second or two is amazing.
Imagine if your workforce had that mindset. If your team consisted of people who expect and desire to better themselves every day, imagine what that would mean for your customers, your business, efficiency, quality, and safety? That would be pretty special.
Insights are based on research and do not imply endorsement, affiliation, or association.
