Whether you are building a sports team or a company, author Rosabeth Moss Kanter recommends culling lessons from the sporting arena. In a Harvard Business Review blog,  Kantar turns her gaze to both World Cup Soccer action and the cricket field.

What can we learn from the playing field? Kantar writes: “The leadership culture surrounding teams shapes outcomes. Whether in the boardroom, locker room, or living room, success is derived from not just the talents of individuals but the context surrounding them.”

If you caught any World Cup coverage this past summer, you may have witnessed the French team’s “emotional meltdown,” or the German team’s “discipline.”  Nigeria faltered while its country’s soccer federation suffered a corruption investigation. All of these examples point to the culture and leadership surrounding each soccer team.

Kanter uses this lens in the book Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. For this book, she researched how cricket teams in various countries rose and declined based on both culture and leadership practices. In this blog, she writes how the Australian Cricket Board’s (now Cricket Australia) fostered leadership and innovation, building a “winning national team.” Key tactics, which can be used in both business and on the field, included:

• Letting players mature and grow instead of discarding them, creating a solid team.
• Founding a youth cricket academy to invest in younger athletes.
• Offering scholarships for this academy for talent programs and camps.
• As winning made the sport more popular, the money from attendance was used to enliven World Series matches, and corporate sponsorship began.
• Good press made cricket even more popular.

The next time you watch your favorite sport team in action, think about why these players are successful or, alternatively, why your team is in the middle of a losing streak. And whether you are a leader on a field or at a company, use the lessons from this article and from your viewing time in your life.

For a lesson in chemistry, take a look at the Chicago Blackhawks current season, writes Bryan Dietzler in an online Bleacher Report article.

Avid sports fans may think the Blackhawks are currently suffering from “Stanley Cup Hangover.” Since the team won a championship last year, the slow season start is a common sports phenomenon of not playing at an optimum level after a championship winning year, aka a “hangover.” Dietzler says this may be true, but the bigger reason behind their struggles is due to team chemistry.

“Chemistry is the result of extended time practicing and playing with a group of people in order to build cohesion and team unity,” wrote Dietzler. The Blackhawks traded players and released other team members and signed new talent after winning the Stanley Cup. In effect, the Blackhawk’s team chemistry has been seriously interrupted.

Dietzler points out that hockey lines thrive on chemistry or teamwork: players need to “think and do things without speaking and know each other’s tendencies.” A hockey line moves as a single unit. It’s hard to act as one person until the new players and old players rebuild their chemistry, learning how each teammate think and plays.

As the Blackhawk’s “new” team begins to gel, watch for the team chemistry to come together on the ice.

The idea of talents or special gift is a myth, writes Tony Schwartz in a recent blog post at the Harvard Business Review. Have you stopped yourself from trying new activities or working hard at difficult pursuits by telling yourself you lack talent for the specific endeavor? It’s time to reroute this way of thinking.

Schwartz shares the comment of Will Durant, who was channeling Aristotle’s thoughts, “We are what we repeatedly do.” That’s right. We aren’t born tennis players, star quarterbacks or successful CEOs. And we don’t need an innate ability to master a task. Schwartz, president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, has found in his work with executives “that it is possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest.”

We’ve talked before about the idea of 10,000 hours: many researchers believe 10,000 hours of practice is the bare necessity to garner expertise in any complicated domain. This means mastering any activity, from racquetball to writing, involves “frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures,” writes Schwartz. The reward is simple: success at something you care about via hard work is satisfying.

Schwartz gives us six keys to achieving excellence. Here’s an abbreviated (and paraphrased) version of his tips:

1. Pursue what you love: passion motivates us.

2. Do the hardest work first: practice in the morning before other endeavors because we all have good energy in the a.m.

3. Practice intensely: practice for no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break.

4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses: look for simple, precise advice, and don’t seek too much feedback, which can create anxiety.

5. Take regular renewal breaks: Relaxing rejuvenates us and helps embed learning.

6. Ritualize practice: Create specific, absolute times for practice. It’s not about will and discipline, but about creating habits so you practice automatically.

So remember, excellence is always possible when we care about something enough and are able to, as well as choose to, dedicate the resources to working at it in a focused and consistent process.