I was on a flight, scrolling through movies. Landed on Ted Lasso again. (Still love it.) You know the line, heard it a hundred times. But thinking about my own teams, it landed different this time.
"For me, success is not about the wins and losses."
Here's the trap I keep seeing. In myself too.
You start managing the scoreboard. Did we hit the target. Did we ship on time. Did we beat last quarter.
All fair questions. All looking backward at outcomes.
Nobody asks who the team is becoming while they chase those outcomes. That's most of the job.
So I started asking something simpler.
Just this: did we get a little better? Not transformed. Not world class. Just a little better.
- A handoff that didn't break this time.
- A customer call that went smoother.
- A mistake we actually learned from instead of burying.
- A problem we fixed instead of working around for the fourth month straight.
Small stuff. It adds up fast.
There's a real difference between two kinds of teams.
One thinks "just hit the number." The other thinks "let's become the kind of team people can count on."
I've been on both.
The second one still cares about numbers. Sometimes more. But hitting a number isn't their whole identity. The numbers become what happens when a good team does its thing.
Goals don't go away.
You know the ones. "Increase productivity 15%." Nobody remembers those a few months later.
So instead I gave my team a sentence they could use when things got messy. Six words:
Did we get a little better?
And here's the funny part.
It starts answering real questions for you.
- Customer blows up. Instead of the usual blame shuffle, someone asks: what do we do better next time?
- Someone screws up. The room doesn't go quiet, because the question is already there: what did we learn?
- Another department is drowning. You catch yourself thinking: are we the team people count on or not?
Sounds too simple. I thought so too.
But simple is the point. If they can't remember it when they're stressed and tired, it's not a mantra. It's a poster.
You can't control every win or loss. Some quarters go sideways no matter what you do.
What you can shape is who your people are becoming while they work for you. That's the part that follows them to their next team. Their next job.
So maybe skip the big speech this month. Just ask them the small question. And mean it.
Did we get a little bit better?
Don't overthink this. The best mantras are short enough to say when you're frustrated, and specific enough to mean something.
Start with one of these. Say the sentence out loud. Pick whatever feels true. Then cut words until it stings a little.
Say it out loud. Would you actually say it at 4pm on a bad Thursday? If not, keep cutting. And check this: does it tell someone what to do, or just how to feel? "Win together" feels nice. "Own the problem, not just your piece" tells me what to do Monday morning.
Keep it to one. I made the mistake of giving my team five options once. They remembered zero.
Don't announce it with a big reveal. Just start using it. Next time something goes wrong, ask the question out loud in the meeting. People pick it up faster than any launch email ever could.