‘Game Time’ is a leadership fallacy. Here’s the real teamwork lesson from sports

Imagine a team of talented players led by a coach who is singularly focused on wins. They’re doubly driven by the owners’ new “results-only” mandate. They act accordingly, spending days taking calls with other coaches and diligently preparing for “Game Time.”

Although the coach is well-meaning, they’re often too busy to meet with their players and never hold team practices. “They’re a motivated and talented group,” they think. “I’m sure they’ll hone their skills on their own.” Plus, they hold everyone accountable through weekly Scores and Stats reports.

Any coach operating their team this way would be summarily fired before the first match. Even your average sports fan can see that a disastrous season is in the making. Now reread the story but replace coach with manager and players with employees.

Sound familiar? Managers run their corporate teams like our hypothetical coach. Why? The flawed assumption is that it’s always game time.

The Game Time fallacy

We all know what’s measured is what matters, but years of performance reviews have convinced workers that the corollary is also true: the only thing that matters is what’s measured. Whether shipping a new feature, expanding a client engagement, or launching in a new market, success is measured by what gets delivered. Add to the scenario that there’s always too much to do, and it’s no wonder that activities like team practices get deprioritized or skipped altogether.

Game Time isn’t bad—teams need to deliver. When this stressed state becomes the constant, performance and people fail. In this mode, employees find themselves forever sprinting toward the next deliverable, which means, like for our ill-fated soccer club, it’s always Game Time. And that’s a problem. While sprints and deliverables are critical business components, teams have little room for reflection, learning, and innovation when every decision is make-or-break.

When a success-at-all-costs leadership mentality combines with a hard deadline, there’s little room for error. These forces put teams in unfavorable situations by limiting options and increasing the odds of poor choices and burnout. Game Time also depresses risk-taking and experimentation because every decision might impact the result.

Teams burn through energy in a constant state of alert, looking for internal and external factors that threaten success. They feel forced to react to elements they can’t control, such as competitors’ moves or changes in customer behaviors. Managers suffer, too. High-stakes environments drag team leaders into the weeds, demoting them from observing and directing their team to another pair of hands.

Operating in Game Time all the time is exhausting. Unsurprisingly, 66% of American workers are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work, and 42% report experiencing burnout. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

The Game-Time fallacy, as we call it, is a myth. This approach discourages learning, coaching, and growth, leading to exhaustion, burnout, and disengagement. However, leaders have the power to change this narrative. By prioritizing Practice Time, they can counter the Game-Time Fallacy and create an environment that fosters learning, coaching, and growth.

The practice of practice

High-functioning collectives, like elite sports teams, use practices to great effect. During these rehearsals, the team works on new plays while individuals learn techniques through repetition, all without the chaos of external factors. While training, everyone understands that mistakes don’t affect the team’s record, which means errors aren’t just acceptable—they are expected and encouraged.

The same should be true in business. Practice Time is deliberately low stakes, creating a safe and supportive space for teams to take risks, experiment, and learn from mistakes, fostering a sense of value and security.

Professional sports teams use pre- and post-game analyses to identify strengths and weaknesses and decide strategies. Business leaders should do the same with project kickoffs and retrospectives. Before the whistle blows, teams can gather to define project operating agreements and anticipate potential sticking points.

After the group completes the project or reaches a significant milestone for longer initiatives, regroup for a debrief to reflect on what went well and what could’ve gone better. These sessions will help teams identify what growth opportunities need work.

“Fu Pan is a Chinese term borrowed from chess, which translates into replaying the chess board or analyzing the moves to do better the next time,” according to the Economic Times report on the concept used in business. Lenovo and other companies are known for evaluating projects using Fu Pan to see what went right and wrong. “Across the entire organization, there’s a culture of continuous learning and accountability,” says Jeanne Bauer-Hamlett, VP of HR at Lenovo Solutions & Services Group (SSG). “Using Fu Pan enables us to evaluate and learn from successes and mistakes. This process of constant reflection and improvement is something I think Lenovo does best.”

As leaders, managers play a crucial role in identifying and addressing team weaknesses. They should focus on improving the problem areas they identify as coaches do. Practice provides a space to quickly and safely catch errors and weaknesses before they impact the team’s performance. By actively participating in Practice Time, managers can create a supportive environment that encourages learning and growth.

Knowledge workers commonly need to improve interpersonal skills like giving and receiving feedback or dealing with conflict and operational skills like managing task handoffs or improving data analysis. Managers should create scenarios where they can try things and feel safe to fail while providing constant feedback.

Questions to ask in a project kickoff:

• How the team will work together
• What roles and responsibilities each participant will hold
• What are this project’s unique challenges, and how they might approach them
• How will we handle feedback and disagreements?

Questions to ask in a post-project regroup:

• What went well?
• What could’ve gone better?
• What will we do differently next time?

Another opportunity to lean into non-Game Time moments is new hire onboarding. When players join a storied team, leaders introduce them to its history and values. The team also puts them through initiation rituals, introducing them to the broader team and their fans. The same should be true for new employees.

The first few days of an employee’s time at an organization are critical, yet they are mostly spent setting up accounts and being overwhelmed by documentation. This is a missed opportunity for the new employee and the team they are joining. Onboarding should focus on sharing the team’s norms, rituals, values, and beliefs. It’s an opportunity to reinforce how the team works together with everyone, not just the new hire.

Leaders can and should be coaches

A team can be stacked with incredibly talented players, but without a skilled and attentive coach focused on getting them to play as a collective, they’ll ultimately fail to achieve.

Similarly, managers should spend time with their direct reports as they go about their day. They should observe them during meetings and calls, taking detailed notes about specific observable behaviors and whether they’ve had a positive or negative impact. They should share those observations promptly, constantly looking for patterns and coaching them through their strengths and weaknesses.

Leaders spend plenty of time discussing winning, but they too often fail to apply the tactics that help high-functioning sports teams do nothing but win. Companies are just collectives of individuals with diverse skills and shared objectives, much like elite sports teams.

But unlike companies, sports organizations have spent decades (even centuries in some cases) obsessing over how to get the best out of their teams through practice, coaching, and strategy. This season, it’s time for that to change.