Want some inspiration that your team can be great? Leading teams is a huge skill to develop – though it can be overwhelming when you’ve got so much going on in the business.

Author Don Yeager interviewed 100 team leaders in the sports and business worlds to identify common traits. The following formula can help you start thinking about what’s important for your team to be successful:

Culture -> Behaviors

The right culture drives the right behaviors. When you’re leading teams, you have to show the team what you value, what behaviors you’re looking for, and then reward those behaviors.

Behaviors -> Habits

Great behaviors, repeated over and over, lead to habits. Once you get your habits going, you’re unshakable.

Habits -> Winning

In the 30 years the study covers, all great team leaders said that to have a championship team, you need those habits engrained throughout your organization.

Enter the Girl Scouts. But it’s not just sports analogies. Frances Hesselbein transformed “the largest organization for girls and women around the world”—the Girl Scouts—by modernizing their resource handbooks to promote math, science, and technology. And they got on board with new marketing:

“The Girl Scouts quickly tripled racially and ethnically by making our message reach all girls,” Hesselbein said. “We asked ourselves, ‘When women and girls look at us, our board, staff, materials, and handbooks, can they find themselves?’ So we made a passionate commitment to make that a reality, and our people were ready for it.”

There are 16 Differentiators. In the book Great Teams, a few that stood out as important in leading large teams in organizations:

• Successful teams are connected to a greater purpose. And it’s not “We want to win”.
• Great teams look at their culture openly and are always trying to improve it. For example, if you say that you value customers above all and one of your employees helps a customer change a tire in the parking lot, reward that employee.
• Excellent teams deal with problems head on – they don’t run from dysfunction. They know that facing and resolving issues saves time, money, and emotional capital.

Check out this four minute summary (they even get in a dig at the Patriots).