Teams Win When They Believe They Can

Football was a huge part of my life growing up. I played competitively through my youth and early adulthood as a striker and while scoring goals was the aim, what stayed with me most was what happened after the ball hit the net.

When you score a goal there is that surge of adrenaline, the sprint to the corner flag, the roar, the release of energy. Yet if I reached the corner flag and no one followed, the moment faded almost instantly. When my teammates came charging after me shouting and celebrating, it became something entirely different. In that moment it was no longer my goal, it was ours and the feeling meant more, lasting far beyond the moment itself.

It was then I realised that moments of success feel hollow in isolation. Achievement only becomes meaningful when it is shared. The best teams I played in recognised that truth. There was an unspoken understanding that if one of us scored, we all scored.

"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships"

-Michael Jordan

That lesson resurfaced years later in leadership. When I joined Salesforce in 2019, I took over the Startups team for Germany and Austria, a group that had found it difficult to succeed as individuals and as a team. For the first nine months of the fiscal year only one Account Executive had reached their monthly quota once, which meant eight of them had yet to achieve it. Confidence was understandably low.

It would have been easy to assume the problem was the people, the market or the targets. It wasn't. The issues ran deeper. The fundamentals were missing, confidence had eroded and collaboration was limited. The team had lost clarity, momentum and belief.

When I stepped in at the start of Q4, only three months remained in the fiscal year. The first step was to reconnect them as a team rather than a group of individuals. We introduced regular deal reviews, group forecast meetings and shared learning sessions to rebuild communication and trust. Alongside this, we organised small offsites, team dinners and plenty of informal catch-ups to strengthen connection beyond targets.

As communication improved, so did confidence. Team members began sharing challenges, exchanging ideas and supporting each other's deals rather than competing in silos. We joined client calls together, coached live and made sure every small win was recognised and celebrated. Momentum built quickly and belief that something extraordinary could be achieved followed shortly after.

When we first forecasted January, the most important month of the year, the bottom-up projection from the team was €400k. The leadership view was closer to €600k but the data offered little reason to believe we could reach it. Pipeline coverage and conversion trends suggested more of the same.

We stayed disciplined, collaborated and focused on the deals that mattered most. We started building momentum, momentum turned into belief and belief turned into performance.

We finished the month at just over €1 million, the first team in that segment's history to cross the million-euro mark in a single month.

It was a reminder of how much can change when people start believing again. The same team, with only minor changes, went on to become the top performing group across Central Europe the following year. Why? It wasn't because they became more talented, but because they focused on the right priorities, collaborated more effectively and believed they could achieve something special. Their success led to further investment and the expansion of the startup segment into multiple teams.

That lesson feels even more relevant today. In many organisations, Account Executives and managers are not unmotivated because they lack ambition, but because their targets no longer feel achievable. When people stop believing they can reach their goals, even the most talented teams lose energy.

I recently spoke to a company whose growth plan centred on achieving 10x. When asked how they planned to reach that figure, whether through new products, greater marketing investment or more leads through partnerships there was silence. The focus had been on investor confidence and total addressable market (TAM), not team belief. For those on the front line, the result was predictable: frustration, disengagement and lost momentum.

At senior level, bold vision can inspire. Without a clear path to get there however, it risks alienating the very people expected to deliver it. The middle layers of leadership are where vision becomes execution. Translating big goals into achievable steps is what gives teams something to believe in again.

As my roles became broader, it became clear that belief is scalable only when built through others. Our team became the driving force that turned vision into action and culture into habit. Over time, the role shifted from creating belief in one team to enabling it across an organisation, ensuring confidence, trust and pride reached every layer.

Belief isn't built once, it is built every day. It starts with connection, grows through clarity and endures through consistency. When people believe in their leaders and each other, they do not wait to be pushed, they push themselves.

Belief changes how people see themselves and what they think is possible. Once a team believes, talent follows, effort compounds and performance becomes inevitable.

That's how teams win, they believe they can.