We talk a lot about how business is a team sport. We talk about getting the right people on the team, creating alignment, building trust, and getting everyone moving in the same direction.
But if business really is a team sport, there is something great coaches have understood for a long time that business leaders sometimes overlook: a collection of talented people doesn’t become a great team simply because they share an objective.
John Wooden understood that. One of the most repeated stories about the legendary UCLA basketball coach is that he taught his players how to put on their socks and properly lace their shoes. These were elite college athletes. They already knew how to get dressed.
But Wooden wasn’t really teaching socks and shoes. He was establishing an expectation: nothing important to the performance of the team would simply be assumed.
Business leadership often works differently. We promote talented people into management. They learn from the people above them, move into larger roles, work for different companies, and accumulate practices along the way. Eventually, some become CEOs, COOs, and senior executives responsible for aligning hundreds or thousands of people around a strategy.
Somewhere along that journey, we assume they learned how to do that. But did they?
Most leaders inherit at least some of how they lead. Organizations do the same thing. And there is an important difference between having a way of operating and deliberately designing how an organization should operate. That difference becomes increasingly important when a company needs to grow, integrate, transform, or move quickly.
Most Organizations Inherit How They Operate
Think about how management practices develop. A founder establishes certain ways of doing things. Finance develops reporting and forecasting practices. Sales creates its cadence. Operations establishes processes and measures. HR develops talent practices. New executives bring ideas from previous employers. Acquisitions introduce still more.
Eventually, the company has a collection of practices that determine how work gets done. Some may be exceptional. Some may have outlived their usefulness. Some may work well independently while conflicting with another part of the organization.
The company unquestionably has a way of operating. But was it ever deliberately designed as an interconnected system?
There is enormous value in spending 20 or 30 years inside successful organizations. But experience often gives leaders a collection of practices developed under different circumstances. It doesn’t necessarily teach them how to enter a new organization, understand what makes it work, and align its parts around what comes next.
This may be one reason boards, sponsors, and recruiters value executives from sophisticated large companies for step-up leadership assignments. The assumption is understandable: those executives have been exposed to systems, processes, and operating discipline. They probably have.
But working inside a sophisticated operating system is not the same as knowing how to build one. Just as playing on a championship team doesn’t necessarily teach you how to build the next one.
The Operating Model Must Serve the Strategy
Vision defines where we are going. Strategy defines how we intend to get there. But strategy still has to travel through an organization.
Structure has to support it. Capabilities have to exist or be developed. Decisions need owners. Information has to move. Functions have to work together. Performance has to be measured consistently. Governance, leadership behaviors, operating practices, and supporting systems all have to reinforce the direction.
That’s the role of the operating model. And this distinction matters:
The operating model should be designed around the business you’re trying to build—not copied from the business you used to run.
Diagnose Before You Prescribe
This becomes especially important during acquisitions. Imagine assembling a platform from 20, 30, or 40 successful founder-led businesses.
Those companies weren’t acquired because they had no value. They may have extraordinary customer relationships, strong local reputations, entrepreneurial leaders, deep technical knowledge, talented employees, effective service practices, and decades of credibility in their markets. Those characteristics may be part of what made the businesses worth acquiring.
Then new leadership arrives with a mandate to professionalize, integrate, and scale the enterprise. The temptation is understandable: bring in the structures, systems, processes, and management practices that worked somewhere else—particularly if the new leadership team came from a larger, highly successful company.
But that creates an important question: What if, in professionalizing the business, we eliminate some of what made it valuable in the first place?
Before prescribing the future, leadership needs to understand what it actually acquired. What is already working exceptionally well? Why do customers choose these businesses? What created their success? What should be preserved? What should remain local? What needs to become common? And what genuinely needs to change?
This isn’t an argument against standardization. Scale often requires it. Common financial definitions, governance, performance reporting, decision rights, technology, processes, and operating disciplines can all be essential to building an enterprise from previously independent businesses.
But standardization and alignment are not the same thing. The objective isn’t to make every business identical. It is to determine what needs to become common so the enterprise can operate together without eliminating the local strengths that created value in the first place.
Standardization creates scale only when you standardize the right things. Standardizing away the reasons you bought the company destroys value.
That is why diagnosis has to precede prescription.
Speed Makes This More Important, Not Less
This principle isn’t limited to private equity. It applies to businesses of every size and ownership structure. But private equity makes the consequences particularly visible because the clock is running.
There is an investment thesis, a value creation plan, and an expected investment horizon. The organization may simultaneously be expected to accelerate growth, improve margins, integrate acquisitions, increase recurring revenue, implement systems, develop leadership capability, and standardize processes.
The natural response is: Get moving.
Which brings me back to Wooden. His UCLA teams could play fast. But their speed wasn’t created by skipping fundamentals to get down the court more quickly.
The fundamentals made the speed possible.
Players understood expectations. They knew their responsibilities. They practiced relentlessly. They didn’t need to renegotiate how the team operated every time possession changed. That allowed talented individuals to move quickly together.
Organizations face the same challenge. When decision rights are unclear, measures conflict, functions operate independently, communication is inconsistent, and priorities compete, telling everyone to move faster doesn’t create speed. It creates friction.
The operating model isn’t something you establish because you have time. It’s something you establish because you don’t.
Speed applied to alignment accelerates execution. Speed applied to misalignment accelerates dysfunction.
For a PE-backed company executing a value creation plan within a compressed investment horizon, that distinction can become very expensive.
Great Leaders Know How to Build the Right Model
Some leaders, like some coaches, bring essentially the same system everywhere they go. They know what worked before, and they expect the organization they inherit to adapt to it. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The more important capability isn’t having a model. It is knowing how to build the right model for the organization you’re leading.
That requires understanding what already creates value before deciding what needs to change. It means determining what should be preserved, what should become common, and what must be different to execute the strategy.
A new CEO shouldn’t arrive assuming the operating model from the last company should become the operating model of the next one. They should bring something more valuable: the ability to diagnose an organization and deliberately build the operating model required for that organization to succeed.
That may also be worth considering when selecting senior executives. Boards, sponsors, and recruiters already evaluate industry experience, P&L responsibility, growth, EBITDA improvement, M&A experience, transformation results, and leadership style. All of those things matter.
But perhaps there is another question worth asking:
How do you diagnose an organization and build the operating model required to execute its strategy?
The answer might reveal something another discussion about leadership style never will.
Whether you’re leading a founder-owned business, a public company, or a private equity platform, you already have a team. You already have a strategy. And you already have a way of operating—whether it was deliberately designed or simply inherited.
The leadership challenge is to understand what makes that team successful, preserve what creates value, and align how the organization operates around where it is going and how it intends to get there.
If business really is a team sport, the leader’s job isn’t to arrive with the playbook from the last team and demand everyone learn it.
It’s to understand the team they’ve inherited—and build the playbook that allows this one to win.
