🎛️ Too Many Scoreboards: Why Your Team Isn’t Aligned

⏳ Read Time: 4.5 min

🧭 What’s in this newsletter?

• 📘 Anecdote: When a successful coach walked away—because her scoreboard wasn’t the department’s.

• 🔬 Research Insight: What McKinsey, Lencioni, and Coyle reveal about alignment, culture, and fractured trust.

• ✅ Five Takeaways: Practical steps to eliminate silos and re-center your culture.

• 🧰 Mini Playbook: A downloadable 5-step checklist to align your team around one scoreboard.

🛠️ Want to win more? Build leaders.

From high school programs to collegiate powerhouses, The 5 Voices is empowering championship teams across the country to cultivate resilience, accountability, and leadership that lasts far beyond game day.

Discover your leadership voice and the voice of every player.

Build a team that wins from the inside out.

🏆 Anecdote: Success Without Alignment Still Fails

In one major athletic department, a celebrated women’s basketball coach grew increasingly frustrated over a two-year stretch.

While her team posted back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances, internal tensions simmered. Fundraising and marketing teams prioritized the revenue sports—football and men’s basketball—devoting resources and public messaging almost exclusively to their events.

Meanwhile, operations staff were under pressure to manage rising costs, sometimes cutting corners on facilities and staffing for non-revenue teams.

From the coach’s perspective, her scoreboard — program growth, athlete experience, and national success — was being ignored in favor of ticket sales and headline-grabbing efforts.

From the admin’s perspective, they were trying to "keep the lights on" in an era of mounting financial pressures.

In the end, despite the coach’s success, she left for another university — citing a "lack of departmental alignment and shared vision" in her public farewell.

Sound familiar?

🔬 Research Insight: When Everyone Plays a Different Game, Everyone Loses

When every unit in an athletic department is chasing a different “win,” dysfunction isn't just likely—it’s inevitable. Coaches are focused on wins and athlete experience. Development needs donor dollars. Compliance is locked in the rulebook. Admins are watching budgets. Everyone is working hard, but that’s not the same as working together.

Patrick Lencioni, in his foundational work The Advantage, says that “organizational health”—defined as clarity, alignment, and trust—is the greatest untapped competitive advantage in any business or team:

Daniel Coyle, in The Culture Code, adds that high-performing cultures constantly reinforce shared identity through visible cues—language, rituals, and repeated behaviors that answer the question: “What game are we playing together?” When people stop seeing themselves in the larger mission, they default to their own scoreboard.

Finally, McKinsey & Company’s 2023 report on “The State of Organizations” found that companies with strong cross-functional alignment were:

• 2.2x more likely to outperform peers on revenue growth

• 2.0x more likely to report high employee engagement

In Short: When alignment breaks, so does trust. And when trust breaks, even the “right” scoreboard doesn’t matter.

✅ Five Practical Takeaways:

How to Align Your Department or Team Around One Scoreboard

1. Name the One Scoreboard
   → What ultimate game are we all playing? Winning championships? Developing people? Representing the university with excellence?
   → Leaders must clearly define the shared big win—something bigger than any single sport, event, or job description.

2. Translate It Across Roles
   → Once you define the scoreboard, help every unit see how their work moves the score.
   → Marketing moves excitement. Fundraising moves resources. Operations move execution. Connect the dots clearly for each group.

3. Tell One Story, Over and Over
   → Culture drifts when people stop hearing what matters.
   → Celebrate shared wins across teams, not just individual sports or departments.
   → Use meetings, emails, awards, and social media to convey a unified message.

4. Build Cross-Department Relationships
   → People align better when they trust each other.
   → Create opportunities for admin, coaches, and staff to interact outside of their silos—lunches, joint projects, collaborative retreats.

5. Audit for Misalignment Regularly
   → Don’t assume alignment once you’ve built it.
   → Create rhythms (quarterly check-ins, anonymous surveys, listening tours) where leaders can identify where different scoreboards are creeping back in—and course-correct early.

🏁 Conclusion: Same Team, Same Scoreboard

The best departments don’t just have great people. They have aligned people.
Because when everyone plays by a different scoreboard, even your wins feel like losses.

If you're serious about culture, start by asking the hard question:
Are we really playing the same game?

Want to do this with your team today? Here’s a 5-Step Checklist:

Want us to help?

The first step in building alignment in your team, staff, or athletic department is with Role Clarity. We can perform a role clarity exercise with your team virtually or in person. Just email us and let us know you’re interested.

👀 Here's What We're Paying Attention To

🏛️ Kentucky's Bold Move: Restructuring Athletics into an LLC

The University of Kentucky is pioneering a significant shift by transitioning its athletics department into a separate entity, Champions Blue, LLC. This strategic move aims to navigate the evolving landscape of college athletics, particularly in response to the impending House v. NCAA settlement, which introduces revenue sharing with student-athletes and expands Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) opportunities.

Why It Matters:

• Proactive Adaptation: By establishing an LLC, Kentucky positions itself to manage financial complexities and capitalize on new revenue streams, setting a precedent for other institutions to follow.​

• Governance and Compliance: This structure allows for more agile decision-making while ensuring adherence to regulatory standards, a balance that will be crucial as the NCAA landscape continues to evolve.​

Our Take:

Kentucky's initiative could serve as a blueprint for other athletic departments seeking sustainability and compliance in a rapidly changing environment. Athletic leaders should monitor this development closely, as it may signal a broader trend toward structural reorganization in collegiate sports.​

The Coach Development Every AD Wishes Their Coach Had.

Join our community of 200 leaders of High School Coaches, High School ADs, College Coaches, and College ADs.

If you ask your AD to cover your development, it should be this.