Can Your Team Win in 2026? Maybe.
Kelly VanBuskirk
As someone who’s had the good fortune to coach sports at a variety of levels from Novice to High Performance, I am fascinated by skill development strategies and processes, team composition considerations, and group performance. For years, I’ve studied the philosophies and theories of legendary coaches such as John Wooden, Vince Lombardi, Bobby Bowden, Geno Auriemma, and Mike Krzyzewski, but also lesser known but enormously successful amateur coaches like Bob LaDouceur, Larry Gelwix, and Dave Cisar. In my view, many of the success concepts utilized by the best athletes and sports teams are transferable to workplaces, and having reviewed these for my own purposes in preparation for 2026, I’m sharing some of them for your consideration:
1. Define and understand your mission.
When I was coaching youth football, I wanted to provide the players and their families with a gold star experience. Luckily, I knew enough to know what I didn’t know, and that included just about everything. I turned to people like Bob LaDouceur and Dave Cisar, who were having unbelievable success as American youth football coaches at that time. In LaDouceur’s case, he was the head coach at a small Roman Catholic high school in California – De La Salle High. In spite of its small size, De La Salle had, under LaDouceur’s leadership, a shockingly successful football program: in 34 seasons, the team had a record of 399 wins, only 25 losses, and 3 ties. LaDouceur’s winning percentage (0.934) is especially impressive when you consider that his roster changed every year. The team’s staggering 151 consecutive wins were simply titled “The Streak” by Sports Illustrated.
LaDouceur says that a mission statement serves as a reminder of “an overall philosophy that’s bigger than your program or the game…Everything you do should emanate from your mission statement.” In his case, the mission statement made no comment about winning or scoreboard success. Instead, it talked about making the team’s players better people and advancing the school’s moral and ethical interests. By stating and then following the mission, LaDouceur was able to steer his team the right way every time.
2. Identify and insist on the standards needed to achieve the mission.
In his Pyramid of Success, the legendary John Wooden laid out building blocks that would facilitate his team’s mission. Like LaDouceur, Wooden is hard to argue with: his UCLA Bruins basketball teams won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years, had 4 unbeaten seasons and posted an 88-game winning streak. Amongst his requirements were loyalty, a high work ethic, enthusiasm, and an ability to cooperate. Your organizational mission may have similar requirements, but only careful attention will confirm that. In our law firm, for example, humility is an important virtue because much of our work is complex and requires a lot of discernment (see more on this under “feedback”). In other workplaces, though, humility may not be a necessity. What’s important is that you identify your organizational standards or rules, publish them, talk about them, remind people about them, and enforce them. Your standards facilitate achievement of the mission.
3. Staff your team with the right people.
Your mission and standards should help to identify the kind of team members you need and who can fit into your organization. Not fitting doesn’t mean the person is “bad”; it just means they aren’t compatible with your organization. On this point, Mike Krzyzewski (“Coach K”) says it well:
Make sure that everyone understands your organization’s mission, values, and goals. If necessary, reiterate all of them simply and directly, and take time to answer questions. You want to eliminate confusion over a decision whenever possible, and alignment on what your organization ultimately hopes to achieve will go a long way toward avoiding a potential misunderstanding.
Should we listen to Coach K? Only if we like the idea of success. After all, his career with Duke University and the US Men’s basketball programs has more than enough wins to attract attention – 1202 career wins (the most in NCAA history), 5 NCAA championships, 13 Final Four appearances, 6 Olympic gold medals, and 12 national coach of the year awards.
Wooden highlighted the importance of finding people who match your organization’s intensity levels. As the coach of a team made up of elite athletes that set winning as an objective, Wooden said he looked for intense competitors: “Seek those who seek challenge”, he wrote. He also looked for players that had the following “unteachable” qualities: cooperativeness, unselfishness, aggressiveness, and discipline.
4. Give honest and direct feedback.
Feedback is crucial to achievement of success. In today’s social climate, this may be the most difficult key to individual and organizational greatness. I think it is an important and challenging topic for every manager and employee, every coach and player, every conductor and musician, every teacher and student, and every leader and follower. That’s because, today, we live in a society that values individualism and egocentrism. The “everyone gets a medal” culture that underlines the importance of everyone feeling good about themselves. We all like the idea of feeling good, but how does that interact with concepts like achievement, success, responsibility, and duty?
Here is where some successful leaders and their organizations veer away from the contemporary concepts of feedback neglect, anxiety inducement and triggering. LaDouceur explains his approach this way:
“At the core of my coaching philosophy is direct feedback and being honest with players about their talents, what they’re capable of, and what their potential is…Sometimes outsiders think we’re down on [players], and we’re not bolstering them and giving them confidence. We take the opposite philosophy. We’re not going to lie to [players]. We’re going to tell them, “Your game is not good right now, and here’s why its not good – you take a lateral step or a drop step. Your hips are too high or your base is too wide.”
Similarly, Coach K wrote:
“Encouraging honest conversations can increase employee engagement. People who feel comfortable sharing ideas and criticisms will have a stronger sense of security and psychological safety in the workplace. Your team should feel welcome to speak their minds regarding projects or their well-being. Establishing open dialogues and venues for sharing feedback can lead to better work relationships and a stronger environment of trust.”
One way to make the giving and receiving of feedback easier for everyone in your organization is to make it a staple of your culture. To do that, consider making humility a central organizational virtue. Once everyone in your organization knows that it is acceptable – and necessary – to be wrong at times, its a lot easier to accept feedback. When people in your organization are receptive to feedback, its easier for everyone to give it, as well.
Conclusion
There are, of course, many ingredients to success. In organizations, however, we can learn from the tried-and-true wisdom of leaders like Wooden, LaDouceur, Krzyzewski, Auriemma, and more. Amongst their lessons are:
1. Define and understand your mission.
2. Identify and insist on the standards needed to achieve the mission.
3. Staff your team with the right people.
4. Give honest and direct feedback.
Good luck in 2026. At VanBuskirk Law, we hope you win!