Whereas culture’s focus leans toward conformity to a common core of behaviors, teams focus on the opposite. Teams aren’t about sameness—they aren’t, at their best, about marching in lockstep. Instead they’re about unlocking what is unique about each of us, in the service of something shared. A team, at its finest, insists on the unique contribution of each of its members, and is the best way we humans have ever come up with of harnessing those distinctive contributions together in the service of something that none of us could do alone.

Repeatedly talk about your values so that everyone understands what great talent looks like. And, above all, make it clear that building the team isn’t just one person’s job, it’s everyone’s job.

Teams need to be well-rounded, but their individual members don’t have to be.

7: Rassie United

“‘In this team’, he said, ‘transformation is about more than certain guys playing because they’re black or white, it’s about accepting and respecting each other’s cultures.’ Because if we did that, he said, people would feel comfortable being themselves and play better on the weekend. As such, we’d be more likely to win together, and the more we won together, the quicker we’d transform the mindset of the South African public.

Rassie had a set of rules that every player had to abide by but he also knew he couldn't treat everyone the same. An Afrikaner who went back to farm school in the Boland is likely to be different from a black guy who grew up in a township or someone from a wealthy family who attended an exclusive school in Cape Town. The coaching staff understood that they had to be empathetic to individual needs within a framework that applied to everyone.

When we drove through Khayelitsha, a sprawling township not far from Cape Town airport, lots of little black kids were running behind the bus shouting,’Siya! Siya!’ But suddenly I heard them shouting, ‘Elizabedi! Elizabedi!’ I turned to Siya and said, ‘You know what, my brother, people think having a certain amount of players of colour in a team is transformation, but this right here is transformation.’ My name being chanted in a Black neighbourhood.