Scott Fishman

  • How to Improve Team Cohesion

    How to Improve Team Cohesion

    Quick answer: Team cohesion improves when trust is tested under real pressure, not built at offsites. The fastest levers are making teammates’ workloads visible to each other, holding the standard evenly for everyone, and giving the team shared language to name a gap without it turning into blame.

    • Key Takeaways
    • Real cohesion is built under pressure, a hard deadline or a tight quarter, not at offsites and team dinners.
    • Most low cohesion traces back to teammates not knowing what pressure each other is actually under.
    • Uneven accountability, watching one person coast without consequence, breaks trust faster than any single conflict.
    • Cohesion is a byproduct of a shared standard held consistently, not a goal to chase directly.

    Culture and cohesion get used interchangeably, and that’s a mistake that costs teams more than people realize. Culture is the standard a team holds. Cohesion is whether the people actually trust each other enough to hold it together under pressure. You can have a strong stated culture and still watch it fall apart in a crunch because the team never built real cohesion underneath it.

    I’ve watched this exact gap show up on rosters and in businesses for twenty years. Here’s what actually builds cohesion, not just the appearance of it.

    Cohesion Is Built Under Pressure, Not at Offsites

    The instinct is to build cohesion through comfort, team dinners, trust falls, an offsite with good catering. Those aren’t harmful, but they don’t build what you think they build. Real cohesion gets tested and formed under pressure, not around a table when everything’s easy.

    The athletes on the teams I coached that trusted each other most weren’t the ones who hung out most off the field. They were the ones who’d been through a hard fourth quarter together and watched each other actually deliver. Trust built under pressure is durable. Trust built over dinner is pleasant, but it hasn’t been tested yet.

    Action step: look for the next genuinely hard moment on your team’s calendar, a tight deadline, a difficult client, a launch under pressure, and treat it as a cohesion building opportunity, not just a stressful week to survive.

    Cohesion Requires Knowing What Teammates Actually Do

    A surprising amount of low cohesion traces back to something simple. People don’t actually understand what their teammates are responsible for or what pressure they’re under. Without that, it’s easy to assume a slow response is laziness instead of someone buried in something you can’t see.

    On a team, this shows up as a guard who doesn’t understand why the center is gassed by the fourth quarter. In a business, it shows up as sales assuming marketing isn’t pulling their weight, without knowing marketing is three deep in an approval bottleneck they don’t control. Cohesion starts closing the moment people can see what’s actually on someone else’s plate.

    Action step: build a habit of surfacing what each person is actually dealing with, not just what they delivered. A five minute round where people name their current bottleneck does more for cohesion than most team building exercises.

    Cohesion Breaks Down Without Shared Accountability

    Nothing erodes cohesion faster than a team watching one person coast without consequence. It doesn’t matter how strong the relationships are otherwise. Once a team sees the standard doesn’t apply evenly, trust in the group starts to crack, quietly, and usually before a leader notices.

    This connects directly to the Consistent pillar in my EFFORT Framework. A team’s cohesion isn’t just about how people treat each other. It’s about whether the standard holds the same for everyone, every time. I’ve written elsewhere about how that framework plays out across sport and business, but the cohesion specific version of it is this: uneven accountability is the fastest way to turn a group of talented individuals into a team that doesn’t trust each other.

    Cohesion Needs a Shared Way to Name the Problem

    Teams with real cohesion have language for naming what’s going wrong without it turning into a personal attack. Without that shared language, a real issue either goes unsaid, or it comes out sideways as frustration directed at a person instead of the actual gap.

    This is part of why I build shared vocabulary into the teams I work with, whether that’s an athletic roster or a sales floor. A team that can say “that’s a Hard problem, not a Smart problem” is naming a gap, not a person, which keeps the conversation about the work instead of about blame.

    Cohesion Is a Byproduct, Not a Goal

    The teams with the strongest cohesion I’ve coached weren’t chasing cohesion directly. They were chasing a shared standard, held consistently, with real visibility into what everyone else was carrying. Cohesion showed up as the result of that, not as something built on its own.

    If you’re trying to improve cohesion on your team, the fastest path usually isn’t a cohesion exercise. It’s tightening the standard, making sure it holds evenly, and giving people a way to actually see what their teammates are up against.

    This is the same work I bring into a room as a high-performance keynote speaker, walking teams through where their real gap is so cohesion becomes a byproduct of a shared standard, not a separate initiative competing for time on the calendar.

    Book Scott to speak →

    This post is part of a series exploring the Hard-Smart-Consistent framework across sport, business, and life. Read more in Effort, or explore how the framework built Team All-American, United Sports Association, and more.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Do team building exercises actually help cohesion?

    They’re not harmful, but they rarely build what people expect. Real cohesion gets tested and formed under pressure, a hard deadline, a tough client, a launch that goes sideways, not around a table when everything’s easy. Treat the next genuinely hard week as a cohesion building opportunity instead of relying only on offsites.

    What’s the fastest way to improve a low trust team?

    Make workloads visible. A surprising amount of low cohesion traces back to teammates not understanding what each other is actually carrying, which turns a slow response into an assumption of laziness instead of recognized pressure. A five minute round where people name their current bottleneck does more than most formal exercises.

    How does accountability connect to cohesion?

    Directly. Nothing erodes trust faster than a team watching one person coast without consequence. Once the standard stops applying evenly, cohesion starts cracking quietly, often before a leader notices. This is the Consistent pillar of the EFFORT Framework applied to team trust specifically.

    Related Reading

    The EFFORT Framework: The Complete Guide to Hard, Smart, Consistent

    Building a Championship Culture at Work

    Why Your Team Is Not Performing Well

    Scott H. Fishman is the author of Effort. Scott earned a Bachelor of Education from the University of Miami and later studied Sports Psychology in grad school at the United States Sports Academy. Coach Scott Fishman has earned the top training certifications including CSCS from National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) as well as certification from USA Track and Field (USATF), USA Weightlifting (USAW), USA Basketball (USAB), National Council on Strength and Fitness (NCSF), and more. With 20 years of experience designing high-performance systems for professional athletes, teams and organizations, Scott Fishman is now a keynote speaker. Scott founded Team All-American, AllWorldU, and is the Chairperson of the Board at United Sports Association (U.S.A.). As an athlete, Scott played professional basketball for the Virginia Wolverines (EBA) and North Jersey Pros (EBA). He’s also a marathon runner. Scott is from New York originally and currently resides in the Greater Tampa Bay Area. Scott is the Executive Director of the St. Pete Marathon and the Director of Growth at Winsignia.

  • Building a Championship Culture at Work

    Building a Championship Culture at Work

    Quick answer: Championship culture is a standard a team enforces every time, not a value written on a wall. It’s set by what a leader tolerates on their worst day, reinforced with shared language for naming gaps, and it compounds, which is why building it deliberately beats hoping it appears on its own.

    • Key Takeaways
    • Culture is a standard a team enforces every time, not a value written on a wall or a mission statement.
    • Culture is set by what a leader tolerates on their worst day, not what they inspire on their best one.
    • Shared language lets a team name a lapse in five words instead of a ten minute conversation, which speeds up correction.
    • Culture compounds over years the same way a strategy executed once doesn’t, which is the entire case for building it deliberately.

    Every championship team I’ve ever coached or played on had one thing in common that had nothing to do with talent. The best team doesn’t always win. The team with the strongest culture usually does.

    Business leaders talk about culture constantly, then default to free lunches and a mission statement on the wall. That’s not culture. Culture is what a team does when nobody’s watching and nothing’s on the line. It’s the standard that holds on a Tuesday afternoon in March, not just during the playoff push.

    I spent two decades building that standard with athletes at Team All-American before I started building it inside businesses through Winsignia. The mechanics are identical. Here’s what actually builds it.

    Culture Is a Standard, Not a Value

    Most companies write down values. Few build standards. A value is something you believe. A standard is something you enforce, every time, regardless of mood, workload, or who’s involved.

    If your team’s standard is “we respond to clients within 24 hours,” that only becomes culture once it holds during a bad week, not just a good one. The teams I coached that won consistently weren’t the ones with the best pep talks. They were the ones where the standard didn’t move when the pressure did.

    Action step: pick one behavior your team already claims to value and check whether it actually holds under pressure. If it doesn’t, you don’t have a value problem. You have an enforcement problem.

    Championship Teams Are Built on Consistency, Not Motivation

    This ties directly into the Consistent pillar of the EFFORT framework I coach leaders through: motivation is unreliable by design. It spikes around a big game, a launch, a new hire, then fades. A championship culture doesn’t depend on everyone feeling inspired. It depends on a floor of execution that holds even when motivation is gone.

    The athletes who made it weren’t the ones who trained hardest on their best days. They were the ones whose worst day still looked like a real training session. The same is true inside a company. A team with real culture still hits its numbers in a slow quarter, still shows up prepared for a client call nobody’s excited about.

    Leaders Set the Ceiling, Not the Floor

    Here’s what most leaders get backwards. They think culture is what they inspire on their best day, the keynote, the all hands meeting, the big vision speech. Culture is actually set by what a leader tolerates on their worst day.

    If a leader lets one person coast, miss deadlines, or treat teammates poorly without consequence, that tolerance becomes the real standard, no matter what’s written in the values doc. Athletes figure this out about a coach in about a week. Employees figure it out about a leader just as fast.

    Belief is part of that standard too, and it starts higher up than most people assume. I asked 50 college coaches a simple, direct question: did they think their team had a real chance of winning the national championship that year. 42 of them, 84%, said no. Not unlikely, not a long shot, no. Some of those were genuinely strong teams with genuinely good coaches, so it wasn’t a talent problem, and it likely wasn’t every coach just being humble either, since a straight yes-or-no question doesn’t leave much room for humility to hide in. That’s the person whose entire job includes instilling belief in a roster of players. If the person setting the ceiling doesn’t believe it exists, the standard the team ends up enforcing was capped before a single practice happened.

    Action step: look at the last time someone underperformed on your team and ask what actually happened. Whatever happened, or didn’t, is your real culture.

    Championship Culture Needs a Shared Language

    One thing that separates teams that talk about culture from teams that live it is language. Championship teams have shorthand, specific phrases everyone understands that point directly at the standard. “That’s a hard problem, not a smart problem” means something instantly to an athlete I’ve coached. It should mean something instantly to your team too.

    Without shared language, culture stays abstract. With it, a manager can name a lapse in five words instead of a ten minute conversation, and the team can course correct in real time instead of after the damage is done.

    Build the Diagnostic Into the Culture, Not Just the Leader’s Head

    A lot of leaders can diagnose a performance gap when they see one. Fewer build that diagnostic into how the whole team operates. A real championship culture means your team can self correct without you in the room, because they’ve internalized the same standard you’d apply.

    This is the same diagnostic I run with teams from the stage as a high-performance keynote speaker, walking a room through Hard, Smart, and Consistent so they leave with a shared way to catch their own gaps, not just a story about a team that once had one.

    Culture Compounds. That’s the Whole Point.

    The reason culture matters more than any single strategy is that it compounds. A great strategy executed once produces one good result. A real standard, enforced consistently, produces a program that wins for years, on the field or in a business. That’s the entire argument for building it deliberately instead of hoping it shows up on its own.

    Book Scott to speak →

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What’s the difference between a company value and a championship standard?

    A value is something you believe. A standard is something you enforce, every time, regardless of mood, workload, or who’s involved. A stated value only becomes real culture once it holds during a bad week, not just a good one.

    Can culture be built without the leader changing anything about themselves?

    No. Culture is set by what a leader tolerates on their worst day, not what they inspire on their best one. If a leader lets one person coast without consequence, that tolerance becomes the real standard regardless of what’s written in a values document.

    How long does it take to build a real championship culture?

    Longer than a single quarter or a new hire, since culture compounds instead of appearing all at once. A great strategy executed once produces one good result. A real standard, enforced consistently over years, is what produces a program that keeps winning.

    Related Reading

    The EFFORT Framework: The Complete Guide to Hard, Smart, Consistent

    Performance Culture Keynote Speaker

    How to Improve Team Cohesion

    Why Your Team Is Not Performing Well

    Scott H. Fishman is the author of Effort. Scott earned a Bachelor of Education from the University of Miami and later studied Sports Psychology in grad school at the United States Sports Academy. Coach Scott Fishman has earned the top training certifications including CSCS from National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) as well as certification from USA Track and Field (USATF), USA Weightlifting (USAW), USA Basketball (USAB), National Council on Strength and Fitness (NCSF), and more. With 20 years of experience designing high-performance systems for professional athletes, teams and organizations, Scott Fishman is now a keynote speaker. Scott founded Team All-American, AllWorldU, and is the Chairperson of the Board at United Sports Association (U.S.A.). As an athlete, Scott played professional basketball for the Virginia Wolverines (EBA) and North Jersey Pros (EBA). He’s also a marathon runner. Scott is from New York originally and currently resides in the Greater Tampa Bay Area. Scott is the Executive Director of the St. Pete Marathon and the Director of Growth at Winsignia.