Culture Drives Results - USA Women's Gymnastic Gold

My favorite parts of the Olympics are the lessons learned. The olympics teaches what it takes to be excellent at life, business, and sports. 

Culture Drives Excellent Results (4 Ways to Create a Winning Culture)

The 2012 Olympic gymnastic women's team competition was a tight race between USA and Russia. As I watched the drama of the event unfold, I heard the announcer discuss the training cultures of the two teams.

He said:

"There is a big difference between the training sessions of Team USA and Team Russia." He discussed how during the Olympic training sessions (a designated training time for Olympic athletes and teams), Team USA's culture is one of positive reinforcement, strong focus, individual excellence, and powerful team support. In stark contrast, Team Russia's training sessions were full of angry, individual dominance, hostility between coach and athletes, and negative energy.

I have always believed that how you practice is how you perform and that team cultures has a big impact on results when it comes to competition time. Such was the case from Team USA & the Fab Five who were crowned with Olympic Gold.

So how is your business culture? 

Because if your team culture is based off of fear, hostility, and title dominance, watch out. You are depriving your greatest resource and hindering huge results.

Creativity, productivity, individual excellence, and inspiring results come from strong a culture. How do you create a team business culture that drives huge results? Build a Team USA culture.

4 Ways to Build Winning Culture

1. Positive Reinforcement: As a manager you are a coach. Tell your teams when they do something right. If all you do is point out how they could have done better you will miss creating a winning culture.

2. Strong Focus: As a manager you drive the strategy. Help drive focus. This is tough, you might want to keep adding stuff to your team's to do list. This causes confusion. You want focus. Help build a culture that drives focus on not doing everything, but doing the right things.

3. Individual Excellence: As a manager your job is to put people in the right place where they can win. A team is only as strong as the weakest link. You have hired people for certain skills. Help them succeed with those skills. Team USA brought McKayla Maroney to the Olympics because of her vaulting skills. It paid off big.

McKayla Maroney's perfectly stuck vault will go down in Olympic history as one of the greatest vaults ever. (except maybe Kerri Strugs, 1996 Vault)

4. Powerful Team Support: As a manager your job is to promote teamwork. Teamwork comes with trust. Build trust among team members and you will build strong team support. Your team will be strong and their results will show it. You could see the team support from Team USA. They were strong. So strong that it provided a winning confidence that propelled them through each event until gold.

Build a gold medal culture.

Build strong cultures of positive reinforcement, strong focus, individual excellence, and team support.