I love coaching sports teams. They share many of the same dynamics as organizational teams. In the case of field hockey, you have to rely on others to help you achieve big goals.

When I was in high school, I played on a championship field hockey team. Field hockey was where I learned to be fierce, play hard, and work as part of a team. I wanted other girls to have that experience, so I helped launch a program at our local high school, and I volunteered as an assistant coach.

My knowledge of the game turned out to be woefully outdated. Now, we play on turf, a faster, more technical game. I had no idea how to coach it. The girls had fun, but we lost nearly every game. At the season’s end, we ranked last in the league.

The next year, we held our record—last again.

Then we hired a bona fide field hockey coach. I was thrilled. Our team had a culture of camaraderie and good sportsmanship. Now we might even win a few games.

Aziz, our new head coach, was a tall, balding, athletic man with twinkling eyes, a handlebar mustache, and a penchant for banana- yellow golf shirts. Fifty girls tried out for field hockey that fall. Twelve of them were freshmen who had played on Aziz’s middle school travel team. They had lightning stickwork. Many of them would make varsity. Aziz’s eyes lit up when those freshmen flocked around him. He was devoted to his players, or at least those twelve. Other girls didn’t seem to hold his attention quite so much. He confided to me that he had a secret agenda for the team: to shepherd those freshmen to a state championship when they were seniors.

He needed to find a way to keep those girls together. So, instead of tryouts, he assigned teams by grade: juniors and seniors would play varsity. Sophomores would play on the Jv team. All his freshmen could play together on the freshman team. They would win every game, he said. It would be the beginning of their ascendancy.

Everyone was mystified. Why were top players stuck on the fresh- man team? Parents called in to complain. Aziz ignored them. Instead, he bought flashy new uniforms and made plans to travel to a tournament in St. Louis.

Why St. Louis? I wondered. Are the teams there worse?

The girls had more practical concerns. “Coach, the tournament is on Labor Day weekend,” our captains pointed out. “People have plans.”

“You’re right,” Aziz conceded. “We shouldn’t go.”

Ten minutes later, he gathered the whole team together and announced, “We’re going to St. Louis!”

The captains were speechless.

Parents were not so speechless. The phone rang off the hook at the athletic department. How did this St. Louis tournament get on the schedule? Who would chaperone? Who would play? How much would it cost? Finally, Jack, the athletic director, put his foot down. The tournament was off.

Aziz went into a funk. His practices became disorganized. Girls stood around waiting for instruction. His funk grew worse every time he watched our beautifully clad players lose a game, which happened reliably twice a week. Emails filled Aziz’s inbox with messages from upset parents and an increasingly grumpy athletic director.

A week later, I got a call from Jack. “I have some bad news for you. Aziz just quit.” “What?!”

“I’m calling to see if you’ll take over as head coach.” “Me?”

“Well,” he admitted, “I called around to see if any professional coaches could do it, but no one was available. Plus, I think the girls trust you. The parents trust you. If you’re up for it, I’d prefer that you be the head coach for the rest of the season.”

I didn’t see that coming. I’d carved out a tidy role as the assistant coach, the one who boosted morale and remembered the Band-Aids, so girls didn’t bleed all over their nice new uniforms. Head coach? Hardly. Still, I couldn’t stand back and watch this program fail.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

Leaders are responsible for up to 67 percent of the team climate. That means you have the power to change what’s happening significantly and quickly.

The next afternoon, Jack came to practice and made the announcement. Aziz had left. Coach Thurber would be the new head coach. Polite applause broke out among the players, but I could see the girls looking wide-eyed at each other.

I stepped forward. “Okay, guys, this is an unexpected turn of events. We need to figure it out together. I’ll be counting on you a lot this season. There’s no way I can do this without everybody’s help. Coach Brody will be our technical coach. Varsity captains will be taking on new responsibilities. We’ll also pick JV captains, who can help out. We’ll be fine. For now, let’s practice.”

In a few days, we got our new routine down. Captains took charge of warm-ups. Coach Brody, a former player for the Jamaican national team, ran challenging drills. I took over the program, and my purpose was crystal clear: I wanted every girl to have a good team experience. To achieve that, I had to improve our team climate.

You often hear people bandy about the terms “climate” and “culture” as if they mean the same thing. They don’t. Culture is the deeply rooted set of values that manifest into every aspect of the organization’s character. Culture doesn’t change quickly. Climate, on the other hand, is a snapshot of the team experience at any given time. Climate changes like the weather.

I was leading a team with a strong culture but a terrible climate. I needed help fixing it. For inspiration, I looked to the climate expert.

Swedish researcher Göran Ekvall identified ten dimensions that affect team climate. Nine make it better. One makes it worse. Unlike culture, where a team leader can hardly make a dent, climate is a place where leaders can have a big impact. Blair often asked leaders to evaluate their team climate by looking at the ten dimensions. Where were they strongest? What needed the most attention? What actions they could take to improve things?

I decided to use the same approach.

According to Ekvall, leaders are responsible for up to 67 percent of the team climate. That meant, as a team leader, I had the power to change what was happening significantly and quickly. So do you. So read carefully.

Ten Dimensions that Affect Team Climate

1.    Challenge and Involvement: People find the work challenging— hard but doable. They are involved in helping shape the daily operations and long-term goals of the organization. People find joy and meaning in their work.
2.    Dynamism and Liveliness: The atmosphere is filled with positive energy. Work is dynamic, and people are energized by new events, novel approaches, and different ways of thinking.
3.    Playfulness and Humor: People are at ease. Conversations are peppered with humor, laughter, and spontaneity.
4.    Freedom: People have some autonomy over how their work gets done. With more discretion over their day-to-day activities, they take initiative to acquire and share information.
5.    Risk-Taking: People move forward in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. They can put their big ideas forward and undertake bold initiatives even when the outcome is unknown.
6.    Idea Time: People have time to think creatively—to test hunches or hypotheses and elaborate on new ideas, even those that are out- side the original task or plan.
7.    Idea Support: New ideas are treated with curiosity and interest. Management listens to proposals. Coworkers try out new ideas in a constructive atmosphere.
8.    Trust and Openness: People feel safe at work and in their work relationships. Communication is open and straightforward. Initiatives go forward without fear of ridicule or reprisal in case of failure.
9.    Debate: People actively put forward different views, ideas, experience, and knowledge. Many voices are heard. People challenge assumptions, opinions, ideas, and the status quo.

While the first nine dimensions support a productive climate, the tenth one destroys it.

10.    Conflict: This is when emotional tensions are palpable. Individuals or groups dislike or hate one another. The atmosphere is one of war- fare. Plotting, trapping, gossiping, and backstabbing are common.

Did you notice that “debate” and “conflict” are on opposite sides of the list? Ekvall found that debate is an asset. Conflict is a liability. Debate happens when you fight over an idea or issue. The goal is to achieve a better solution. Debate can get passionate, but afterwards, you go out for pizza. In conflict, the fight gets personal. People attack each other’s identity, not just their ideas. Conflict hurts. Afterwards, you don’t want to go out for pizza. You want to go out for revenge.

I wondered if Ekvall’s list could help me turn a field hockey team around. I knew I didn’t need to address all ten dimensions at once. I just needed to focus on two or three pain points. For me, those were obvious: challenge, trust, and conflict.

Some of my best players weren’t being challenged because they had been assigned to the wrong team. Coach Brody and I worked together to rebalance the teams until the level of play suited the level of player. Aziz had broken trust with players and parents. To begin to restore that trust, I wrote weekly email updates to parents and took time at practice to share information with players and answer their questions. The conflict, which had been palpable between Aziz and the parents and administrators, began to dissipate. Instead of us working against each other, parents, administrators, and coaches were working together to make a good team experience for the girls.

By the season’s end, the team climate was positive, but our game record was dismal. Once again, we ranked at the bottom of the league. We had one game left—a playoff game to see which of the lowest-ranking teams would qualify for the post-season tournament. As the twentieth-ranked team, we were slated to play the thirteenth ranked, Saint Ignatius, giving them the benefit of an easy win.

Through it all, our captains had kept humor and dynamism alive. Coach Brody had sharpened everyone’s skills and demanded their best. Hockey was fun again. We had two weeks left before the playoff game. As a team, we decided to go for it. We would draw up a brand-new team roster, pulling players from every class. We’d practice every day. We’d give it our all, rankings be damned.

On a sunny Saturday in mid-October, we drove to the beautiful Saint Ignatius campus in Chicago. As we walked into the stadium, we could see the barbecues, picnic tables, and congratulatory banners set up in anticipation of the big celebration. When you play the worst team in the league, you can count on a party after.

Our girls were anxious. Some had never played at the varsity level. The game began, and after a few nervous bobbles, the two teams seemed surprisingly well matched. Then, one team began to dominate. It was our team. When the final whistle blew, we had won the game 2–1. The girls went wild, hugging, high-fiving, taking selfies. We surged across the field to meet our cheering fans. I caught sight of the empty picnic tables and listless party banners. For a moment, I felt bad— but only for a moment. Our varsity team had won. We’d beaten the thirteenth-ranked team in our league. Nobody thought it was possible.

Actually, that’s not true. We thought it was possible.

How did that happen? How did the worst team in the league, a team that lost its head coach mid-season, beat a team so much higher up the ranks?

We didn’t win because we had better players. We didn’t win because we had better coaches. We won because we had a better team. We’d improved our process of skilling up players, we had restored a positive team climate, and, best of all, we’d achieved our team purpose: to give every girl a good team experience.

None of that happened by accident or by luck. It happened because, while I still don’t know enough about the technical aspects of field hockey, I finally had the skill set to lead a good team.

Most of us start with the wrong assumptions. We assume that good people lead good teams, and bad people lead bad teams. But Aziz was a good person and a talented coach who made a lot of errors and ended up with a team full of people problems. He had played favorites, hidden the team purpose from others, and let conflict fester. The team had gotten stuck in a permanent state of storming.

It’s encouraging to know that a leader like you or me can turn a team like that around by attending to the right things. “A team climate is going to happen whether you attend to it or not,” says creativity and innovation expert Marysia Czarski. “So be mindful of it, be alert, be present, and then generate it.” When Marysia works with teams, she uses Ekvall’s insights to help leaders identify their team’s strengths and zero in on a few climate dimensions they could improve.

What Levers Will You Pull?

Consider Ekvall’s ten dimensions. As a leader, how are you doing on these dimensions? Do a quick sort.

• Which dimensions are strong for you and your team?
• Which ones really need attention?

Choose one of the dimensions that really needs attention and, with your team, come up with some simple, often no-cost or low-cost, things you could do to improve on that dimension.

This article is an excerpt from Good Team, Bad Team, by Sarah Thurber and Blair Miller, PhD.