“A team aligned behind a vision will move mountains.” – Kevin Rose

The Tour De France is the the highest regarded cycling event in the sport. This is one of the most intense and athletic competitions known to man. Having gone for centuries, each year, the top teams battle over 21 days across 2,000 kilometers in various stages for the overall win. For a team to win, it takes a commitment from each of the eight team members to follow the plan. The fastest rider on each team has a yellow jersey, and the job of the rest of the pack is to help that person win. These riders are often referred to as a wolf pack because they never travel alone. They hunt together and strategically manage their bikes placement and pace based on where they are in the race and within the peloton of competitors. 

If anyone should deviate from that plan, it puts the team at risk. To follow the plan and stick to it, through each grueling 100+ kilometer stage, each rider must be deeply engaged with what is happening. If a rider slows, crashes or has an issue, he must adapt and get help. If the competition is increasing pace, they must reassess and move. In the final phase of each stage, there is a the most intense push to the finish line where the team must move out and let the chosen rider sprint with all available energy to the line. Any rider who is not mentally strong for this task will never sees the the win. To win the Tour De France, a whole team must be engaged.

What is Engagement Anyway?

The final building block of team cultures of excellence is engagement. When your team culture mixes the ingredients of established values, coaching and empowerment, continuous improvement and high standards, it is then that the team becomes engaged.

Merriam-Webster defines engagement as emotional involvement or commitment. What a fine and fitting way to describe a team that is fully bought in. When the team has engagement, they are intrinsically motivated, self-sustaining and resilient. They do not stop at speed bumps, potholes or road blocks. They are constructive, solution-driven and goal oriented. The vision of what they want to achieve is so clear they can almost reach out and touch it.

Engaged teams show up early for practice and stay late for extra shots. They spend time outside of work researching the industry. They strive to become experts at their craft and they bring each other with them. Engaged teams enjoy conflict, debates and brainstorming to help move the needle of performance. They believe in what they are doing and their sense of purpose is strong.

Fully engaged teams are rare, and for this reason they often are found at the top of their field. A highly engaged team holds each other accountable, leaving a strong contrast with those who come with negative, selfish or compromising motives. Often the problem of low-performance will take care of itself, as those who are not engaged and do not deliver leave the organization by their own decision. If your team is highly engaged, you will match their energy. It is contagious. 

Below are characteristics of a highly engaged team:

• Solution-Driven: They eagerly work to identify and solve problems 
• Continuity: They will not let progress slow when the leader is gone
• Presence: They consistently show up on time and bring all their energy 
• Purpose: They operate at a team with a sense of purpose
• Retention: They are motivated and desire stay on the team

Have you ever worked on a team that just did not have the right energy? They just seemed beat down and uninterested? This is evidence of an unengaged team. Unfortunately, many organizations do not know how to solve unengagement. They do employee surveys and one-off initiatives to address specific concerns and never quite get to the root of the problem. Trying to engage a team that does not first have a culture of excellence is like painting the outside of a dilapidated house. It is a waste of time and will not increase the value. Have you ever seen an engaged team with a culture of mediocrity?

This is why engagement is listed last in this section; it is the result of a team culture of excellence and not the cause. Every team or organization leader must address and fix the the culture to generate team engagement. If the team is not fully engaged, I highly recommend you go back and revisit and work on one of the earlier elements of the team culture (values, coaching and empowerment, continuous improvement and high standards). Engagement then follows.

When Gordon Bethune took over as CEO of Continental Airlines in 1994, he applied a very different approach to the company. Continental was the worst airline in the industry, losing money year over year, there had been ten CEOs in the past ten years and the employees hated working there. Whereas, past CEOs quickly tried to restore profitability, Gordon focussed on restoring trust and satisfaction with the employees. Bethune later recounted, “You can’t have a good product without people who like coming to work. It just can’t be done.” Bethune promptly restored employee engagement by removing barriers to leadership, establishing goals that employees could control and implementing team financial incentives to each one of the 40,000 employees. “We made the stakes something employees could win or lose on together, not separately.” Things would finally be different, only because the leader focused on engagement.

Collaboration

Teams that are engaged are very effective collaborators. The culture of excellence enables them to come together and fuse passion, creativity and thoughts to create great outcomes.

In 2024, the animated movie Flow was released. The entire movie is based on a cat’s journey of survival along with other animals. Not a single a word is uttered throughout the movie. Nevertheless, Flow received an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 97 Oscars. What is more striking than the movie’s plot, however, is that the movie achieved this result with a relatively small budget, time frame and team. 

The team that produced Flow began director, Gints Zilbalodis, a Latvian animator who had previously developed a film, titled Away, a few years prior. Gints began developing the project alone until he brought on a team of artists animators and other creative people to execute his vision. Gints team included co-producer Matiss Kaza, also a Latvian. The project was done on a shoestring budget and took over five years to execute. The team even used an open source software for the animation.

Together, Gints, Matiss and their team earned a long list of accolades:

• Golden Globe Award
• Academy Award for Best Animated Feature
• Academy Award for Best International Feature Film
• Independent Spirit Award for Best International Film

The success of the Flow film was extraordinary. When you consider the individual elements of its production – a small team, tight budget, basic animation software, no storyboards, no dialogue, foreign-produced, the list goes on – one would confidently bet against worldwide recognition for this film. Instead, it moved audiences and critics alike. Viewers connected with the emotion conveyed through the characters, scenes and events. Flow was successful beyond imagination.

But, when you consider the passion and purpose of the team behind the project, perhaps the success was inevitable. The team, led by Gints and Matiss, was deeply engaged throughout the long production period as they worked towards a common purpose: to produce an animated film with global reach, pointing back to Latvian talent. Purpose, engagement and collaboration can drive unexpected results even when the odds are against you.

Heads Down

In addition to being bought in on the mission and collaborating to achieve goals, engaged teams are also heads down on their work. They do not obsess over what other teams are doing. They follow their formula, and if they have the winning formula, they win. Proverbs 4:25-27 speaks beautifully about this:

Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Ponder the path of your feet, then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left, turn your foot away from evil.

What is Solomon saying here? Focus. Stop looking around. Do your work! Great teams know how to do their work. Yes, you have to evaluate competitors on the field, critics and peers in the marketplace. But, that is all part of strategic planning. When there is no more value in paying attention to what others are doing, teams are wasting focus. That energy must be used to produce, perfect and profit.

In Business in the Bible, I talked about Nehemiah’s mission to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Nothing stopped him, not even his enemies who tried to sabatoge his project. He and his team were heads down on their work and the walls were built in 52 days. This type of progress is not possible with distraction, and highly engaged teams know how to maximize their output by focusing.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, says to “attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.”

The best teams in the world do this, and not only on the invidious level, but as a collective.

Winning Teams:

• Prioritize and monitor individual and team engagement.
• Collaborate on key projects.
• Maintain an unwavering commitment to deep focus.

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